1997 Volvo 850 Station Wagon. Maine, Quebec, Nova Scotia

We were going from Downeast Maine to the north side of Mont-Tremblant, Québec with a ton of food, clothes, ski gear. So we rented a Chrysler Pacifica for the trip. Picked it up at Enterprise, left the aged Volvo 850 on their lot, and headed for Canada. It was 8 hours from Downeast to Mont-Tremblant, almost exactly. We love that road which  goes northeast from Skowhegan, Maine up the Carabasset Valley and over the Longfellow Mountains to Cobourn Gore, and into Québec. That part of Québec between the Maine border and Sherbrooke is hill country--the Notre Dame Mountains are one of the Appalachian ranges in Quebec. It is also intensely-farmed dairy country, and there are hayfields and cornfields, but only 3 villages in @ 90 kilometers...Woburn, Notre Dame des Bois, et Cookshire. There was one minor snag of traffic crossing the St Lawrence on the Pont-Champlain and traversing Montréal at 6pm, otherwise... empty roads and winter beauty. It was great to be back in Québec, which sometimes feels like The South of the North...

...and sometimes just feels like The North...

Riviére du diable

We stayed chez les cousins and had a wonderful time. Drove back to Maine on New Year's Day. Dropped the Pacifica at the Enterprise lot in Ellsworth, Maine, transferred all gear to the Volvo, and started for home, but the poor Volvo immediately felt...wrong. Coughing, bucking, sputtering....it felt like something was deeply, seriously, engine-gone-bad wrong. Stalled at a busy intersection between Home Depot and US 1. Pouring cold rain. While we waited for the AAA tow truck, I stood out directing traffic around us, and (this is Maine) 2 different cars pulled up and drivers asked if we needed help. Finally, a cop parked behind us with blue lights on, steering traffic away. We got the car towed to a garage we knew but it was New Year's Day; everything was closed. Had a friend from Brooklin pick us up and drive us the last 20 miles home. We called the garage in Ellsworth the next morning; they were not interested in working on a sick 27-year-old Volvo. Okay. We made the trip to Ellsworth with a Brooklin friend with a trailer. He did some looking around (it's incredibly hard to get the distributor cap off a Volvo 850, especially at wind-chill 6F), then he winched (with a come-along) and I pushed the car up onto his trailer...

    

...and hauled it back to his shop in Brooklin....where a new distributor cap &  rotor & spark plugs set her humming again. Took that photo on top of this post this morning when we drove her home. Volvo's looking pretty good, nous pensons...

...and weather in Maine was clear, cold and dry, so we extracted the truck from Bill Grant's boat shed, where she had been stored in a hurry a couple weeks back, on a day when roads in Sedgwick were a slurry of sand and road salt. Took her up to the carwash at Blue Hill, cleaned her up, settled her back in the shed until April...

...then spotted the first Novi we've ever seen in Center Harbor, later this morning. Those immigrants!  Next thing you know, they'll be calling it Centre Harbour. What's next? Healthcare? 

1961 Mercedes Benz 190, Coney Island.

 

Bruno Spadola caught the Benz. We have always admired the workhorse 4-door 190s. By early 1960s Europe had caught the fin-craze, which was just about done in the US. The nimble SL190 was a different deal. We posted very close kin to this car from Cambridge last year. And the diesel edition, on the road between Cimarron and Taos New Mexico.