This is Down On The Street Bonus Edition, where we check out interesting street-parked cars located in places other than the Island That Rust Forgot. Rust-My-Enemy has found us a genuine Swedish Volvochero!
There has been a rich vein of 'minos on Jalopnik recently, I thought it was about time I sent mine in.
A little background first.
In October of last year, a good friend and I decided to leap into my trusty '98 A4 and go on a bit of a road trip. When I say "a bit", what I mean is a 4000 mile odyssey of mainland Europe. We figured that those cheese-eating, olive-oil soaked, sausage-fancying Yoorpeans needed a bit of close scrutiny from us Brits with our stiff upper lip and penchant for lo-tech dentistry and zany spelling technique.
The trip took in France (including the Millau Bridge as featured in Top Gear), Italy, Switzerland, Lichtenstein (yes, it really does exsist), Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden. In just one week of near solid driving. We literally lived, ate and slept in the Audi, and after 7 days of sweating, cooking and farting, the interior was possibly no longer as Ingolstadt had ever intended. I took several gigabytes of photos and have written the entire endeavour up as a fifteen-thousand word journal, and quite what I'm going to do with it I have no real idea.
And being that way inclined, I always had Jalopnik in the back of my mind. The SLR was always at arms reach, waiting for anything curious, intriguing or motoringistically significant. And in a service station on the main road to Jonkoping, Sweden, I found the very embodiment of the Swedish automotive art.
A Volvochero. I was more than impressed with the execution of this example of 'Cheroism. It started out life as a 760 sedan, and has over its life been treated to the full suite of go-faster addenda, big wheels, many lights, bright red paint, and on closer inspection a pillar-mounted boost gauge. (The colloquial English term for the throwing of lots of accesories at a hitherto unprepossessing car, achieving for example a bright red Volvo with big wheels, is "To Gary it up". Although this car has been well and truly Garried the quality of the conversion kind of validates the concept). Unfortunately the (assumed) owner of the car was big and scary looking so I didn't approach him, opting instead to take photos from far away using the gift of telephoto. I assume the car drives regularly, but I don't know the significance of the big orange triangle in the rear windscreen, a lot of beater cars seem to wear it.
And it was while far away that I bumped into the second treasure on offer at this particular Swedish roadhouse, a monument erected by the Cadillac Owners Club of Sweden. Consisting two thirds of an Eldorado or Coupe DeVille (Don't know which so I'll go for both), cut down and engineless, and appearing to be driving out of the earth. It looks pretty striking in beige, and it earned a good Bork Bork Bork out of myself and my travelling partner.
Overall it was a fantastic trip, and the moment I can afford to pay to fill my tank up eleven times in a single week, I'll do it all over again.
Best regards, Rust-MyEnemy.