Cars

Another in a long series of "Things I did a few weekends ago which I forgot to blog about". I'm now up to Saturday, three weekends ago!

I dragged evildoom_bunny along to the most excitingest place on the whole wide earth - Pick-A-Part in Cambelfield! I challenge you to find a more fun place. Ok, so, maybe Disneyland...

The place is surreal, like the set for some kind of post-apocalypse film, or a sequel to Mad Max. Hundreds of dead cars in various states of dismemberment (is that a word?) slowly dripping oil on to the ground. They're arranged into types - Toyota's over here, Ford's and Holden's over here...

I was looking for two things - hubcaps for Fuji the Wonder Car, and a very specific dongle for the back of a car radio I picked up on ebay months ago. The damn things all seem to have differing plugs on them, and if you don't have the right one, you're screwed.

I spent ages scrambling about Mitsubishi's (that being the brand of the radio) trying to find the right kind of dongle. Whilst evildoom_bunny took pictures of my butt sticking out the door of a car - thanks baby :-P I wasn't actually allowed to bring the radio in to try 'em out, so I had to more or less guess which one looked right. After a while I found one, cut it off with my pliers "because you bring your own tools and do it all yourself."

The search for Subaru hubcaps proved fruitless because there was only one Subaru in the whole place. Which kinda filled me with confidence in my own car - the less of them in that graveyard, the better! Which lead me to an interesting idea - this would be a good place to check out before buying a car - there more of a give model there is sitting around Pick-A-Part, the less reason you should have to buy it! This doesn't quite work for common-as-muck commodores and falcon, which together were about half the cars there. But it was very interesting to see the number of Mitsubishi Magna's, not unlike the one I half owned in 2004. Given the amount of oil that thing drank, I wasn't surprised to see a lot of dead ones. But that there weren't any Subaru's like mine was a good sign...

I tried to take photo's of this one amazing patch of ground. Oil soaked, with rocks and car parts ground in. It looked like a piece of modern art (at least to this ex-Painter). I couldn't quite capture it with my phone camera however.

Needless to say, we left with one tiny car radio dongle. The guy in the booth just waved me away, didn't even bother to charge me for it. Which made it all the better when I discovered the stupid thing didn't fit anyway. Bugger. Maybe I'll just splash out on one of those MP3 car radio's I've seen about the place.

Go check it out, though, a mighty weird place indeed. evildoom_bunny took some usable pictures which I'll post when I get around to it.