On The Hunt For Abandoned Vehicles II

Life for me is one big treasure hunt, and some of my favorite things to find throughout this never-ending game are abandoned cars. Every vehicle left forgotten and rusting in the woods somewhere has a story to tell, and if cars could talk I'd sit down and have a beer with each and every one of them. Here is part two of my search for the abandoned vehicles of New England.

This first day of treasure hunting found me exploring a set of railroad tracks where I was actually in search of some graffiti, said to be very spectacular and hidden somewhere below one of the bridges. Unfortunately, the only graffiti I found was artwork by young boys just learning the human anatomy, but during the course of my exploration I came across this mostly buried car by the edge of the woods. I guessed it to have been sitting there for at least the past few decades, but remarkably when I returned to this area just a few weeks later, it was gone.

Unlike that first car which I stumbled upon purely through good karma, this next one I found after specifically marking it's location on Google Earth, then following a very weak cellphone signal to track it down. Adding to this challenge was that I went searching for it the same week a nor'easter came rolling through town. But telling myself that the harder the search the more rewarding the find, I was able to snowshoe my way out and catch a few glimpses of it beneath the snow. This car is located next to the Ellis River just north of Storyland, a place we visited often when our kids were younger. They're teenagers now and our Storyland days are long past, but you can bet my wife is counting the days to grandkids so she can go howling down that Polar Coaster once again.

Driving through the countryside one afternoon, this apocalyptic farming vehicle caught my eye just as we were passing a field. I pulled to the side of the road and pretended to read my phone until a lady disappeared back into her house from across the way, then I darted across the field as best a 48 year old with one hip can dart, and I snapped this picture.

Somewhere in eastern Massachusetts, abandoned within the no-mans land that separates a public hiking preservation and a private farm, sits this crane. Figuring it was close enough to the public side of things for us to stop and look at, Tina and I soon found ourselves taking turns in the drivers seat and snapping pictures. Only problem was, the cabin door had been rusted shut and it took quite a bit of banging for me to get it open. That attracted the attention of a farmhand who came wandering over, and he was none too happy to see me at that very moment tight-rope walking the boom. I tried explaining that because it sat right next to the trail we figured it was purposely left here for hikers to play on, but this guy was not in the mood for jokes. We got our pictures, but we also got an unexpected cardio workout, double-timing it out of there while the farmhand went yelling for his boss.

Back to my hometown of Dover, where I first spotted this truck in the woods off Tolend Road while driving an area we don't normally travel. Into my mental filing cabinet it went, until later that summer while on a bike ride I took the long way home for a closer look. I'm not very good with all the settings my camera has to offer, but given enough chances even a monkey on a typewriter is going to bang out a sentence every now and then. By this same law of randomness I was able to get all the colors just as I wanted them, for this final picture in today's edition of abandoned vehicles of New England.

Related Links:
On The Hunt For Abandoned Vehicles - Part One