Cars – No 1

Well, I have been meaning to get to this for quite some time, and now seems as good a time as any I guess.

My intent here is to document all of the cars I have owned since I started driving at 16, almost 34 years ago now.

The idea for this came from a school project Matt was doing last year … one of the items he needed to include was a list of all of the vehicles a member of his family had owned. In poor old Matt’s case that proved to be quite a list.

Then, on Mothers’ Day I had a conversation with my mother and sister regarding what cars I had owned and that finally prompted me to get started on publishing this stuff.

The first “cab of the rank”, somewhat paradoxically, was not a car at all but the Honda CB175 pictured above with some really cool looking dude sitting on it. Now, I turned 16 in 1971 and I know that the bike was a couple of years old when we bought it, so lets call it a 1968 model shall we?

The crash bars on this bike came off as soon as I got it … and then went back on about 4 hours later as soon as I dropped it for the first time!

It was also the vehicle I was driving (or “piloting” to use the term favoured by the JP!) when I received my first speeding ticket!

The bike has for me been an item of mystery over the years … it was a birthday present from my parents when I turned 16 and I, for the life of me, cannot figure out exactly how my dad managed to convince mum to let him buy me a motorbike as a present.

My chances of getting Hedy to agree to something like this would be exactly zip!

Anyhow, I learnt a lot riding this thing around … learning basic traffic skills on a bike makes you so much more aware of the traffic around you later on when you are driving a car.

So, there you go … car 1 was a 1968 Honda CB175.

PS. Forgot to say that this is a scan of a very old slide, hence the quality.

Click here to see the new photos