Images that lift your spirits

The end of a perfect camping trip. At Chain Lakes Provincial Park in southern Alberta. Out for a evening stroll.

That is a Renault Dauphine, correct? Lots of memories with this car (hope it's not intrusive.)

Short story is my father-in-law traded a 1953 Corvette for one of these Renault's.

Longer story is as a young man he worked in a Chevy dealership. The dealer approached him one day and said, you're a young guy, you need to buy this car. The dealer had purchased the 53 Corvette for his daughter who drove it about a year but didn't like it. So the dealer kept bugging my father-in-law until he finally bought it for $700.

Turned out the car drew alot of attention, which resulted in people backing into it or hitting it outright. Plus, the car was uncomfortable (straight axles etc.) So when a guy with a Dauphine offered to swap cars, he said sure. The rest, sadly, is history. The Dauphine was very popular at first but was replaced by the VW beetle in popularity and disappeared. Can't remember what happened to the Corvette 😉

A postscript is that he also had a Renault Caravelle, which he drove across the country. I had to look it up on the internet after he told me the model me. When he told me about his Corvette story (i've got a picture of it with him somewhere but not handy now), i thought he had traded his Caravelle for the Corvette, not that it was a Dauphene. So I went looking for a Caravelle.

I ended up owning 3 1/2 Caravelles. The half was a rear of a car that had been turned into a trailer. Here's a picture of a 1967, which was the best runner of the bunch.


They are very fun cars. People would be absolutely perplexed when seeing it. One guy was turning left at an intersection and stopped in the middle of his turn to stare.

It's almost a perfect design. Great gas mileage, only about 95bhp, not fast but fast enough for the weight. Removable hard top plus a canvas flip down top. Perfect. Simple to work on. Getting parts is hard, and it's tough to fit big feet in the driver's well. Plus no safety features. Might as well be sitting on a skateboard doing 70 mph down the road.

Miss it, but not enough to want another.

I had scrubbed and re-filled our one bird bath, and set up my camera on a tripod, inside the front door. I had hoped to capture images of robins, sparrows, blue jays, chickadees, any type of bird but magpies. Sadly, after two days of occasionally monitoring my camera, magpies are the best I can do.