Vintage Old Car City USA!

There is no accounting for taste and when it comes to my taste, I have a slight affinity for 'vintage'. If you ever find yourself wandering the highways just northwest of Atlanta, Georgia, you simply have to pay a visit to Old Car City USA.

Old Car City USA has 4,000 vintage cars dating from 1972 back. I kid you not when I say there are 34 acres of vintage cars or to put a different way, six miles of vintage cars. The beauty of it is, this place only sits about a half mile off I-75 in White, Georgia. CBS News Sunday Morning did a feature story on Old Car City back a few years ago. You can actually do a search online via You Tube and watch it if you like.

Everything about this vintage car city screams decaying, molding, dilapidated and slowly being reclaimed back to the Earth from which it came. There were strings of hub caps and stacks of car doors. There was even a huge row of old bicycles and an old ambulance and single engine airplane toward the front entrance. Everywhere one looked car doors were ajar, truck doors were ajar, the doors were ajar from visitors taking photos of the interiors, which by the way, were also decaying.

While my visit was brief having arrived late in the day, I had to cut it short, as it never occurred to me that before you go into a dilapidated graveyard of automobiles that are rusting and molding away, I needed to apply bug spray. Hence, I found myself getting ate up alive, and while I'm getting ate up alive walking back to the entrance, I'm running news stories through my head about the Zika Virus. Normally, I am amply prepared for my treks, but this day I forgot one important thing, bug spray.

This 'Off the Beaten Path' journey took me back to by gone days of the old Buick my Dad used to pile us into every Friday and off we'd go to the country to my Uncle Lee's Farm, where we would spend the weekend wading in the creek and running through the fields of tobacco and such.

The iconic name plates displayed on the vehicles whether they be leaning deftly due to time warn days or displayed perfectly surrounded by rusty, decaying metal were so cool. But the really really cool thing I loved the most were the fins on some of the old cars. This one in particular was rusting beautifully. Almost as though it knew it was going to be a masterpiece for a photographer's eye. God how I miss the look of the old cars. They had style, real style.

One of my favorite images from my brief visit to this end of the line 'vintage car graveyard' is this rusting red 1955 Plymouth Belevdere. If I squint my eyes just so I can envision one of these on the highways years ago, but seriously I was born in 1955 and the images I conjure up are probably just my imagination. Still so querky looking.

It bears mentioning here before I leave you in the midst of this decaying post, that I will have another post with more pics sometime soon. Oh, the stories these cars could tell if only they could talk! And least I forget, photographers from all over the world travel to Old Car City USA just to photograph the dilapidated cars with their Georgia Pine needles slowly reclaiming the ground they sit on. And to think you thought I had nothing new I could pull out of my hat. And what do I do, but go visit a decaying field of metal objects shaped in strange sizes and shapes covered in Pine needles and peeling pieces of paint layers. The lengths I go to. ENJOY!