V.I.S.I.T. – Vehicles I Saw In Traffic (on the A36 From Montbéliard to Dijon in 1991)

A 10-year-old non-artist’s dramatic depiction of a rented Fiat Uno’s rear license plate.

A moving truck full of stuff showed up at my house two weeks ago. It wasn’t unexpected, as I had hired the movers myself. But the contents of the truck wasn’t strictly all mine (though I suppose now it is) – it was full of, well, stuff from my late mother’s house. Most of the stuff I was expecting – pieces of furniture/artwork/housewares that held sentimental or other value to me, photo albums, papers, Christmas china, and other ephemera that is both meaningful and, let’s be honest, useful. But there were a few boxes of surprises, mostly things my sister simply didn’t want – boxes of books, long-forgotten household miscellany. One or two boxes, however, held fascinating surprises within: my entire childhood’s worth of school papers, report cards, notebooks, drawings, standardized test scores, birthday cards, birth announcements, and just about every other paper-based evidence that I was once a child living in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.

I’m getting to the point. One of the long-lost treasures in this box was my travel journal from my family’s first trip to Europe in 1991. Flipping through the notebook that had likely not been touched in two decades, memories of my first European adventure came flooding back to me, particularly…of course…the cars. 10-year-old me, like 32-year-old me, found ’80s Euro cars slightly more exotic and interesting than they probably actually are. And so it was with that mindset that 10-year-old me set out to document every single new and exotic car I saw on the highways of Switzerland, France, and Germany. 

The most thorough list came on a road trip from my aunt and uncle’s home in Montbéliard, France to Dijon, which is as my journal notes, “the place where Grey Poupon is made.” Reading my account of the journey, I have to admit that I frankly don’t remember much of it even with the journal’s memory cues. It sounds like the trip to Dijon was not particularly interesting and included a lot of walking around lost and grabbing a quick lunch at McDonald’s out of necessity. No wonder my memory didn’t hold onto this particular day very well. One thing I DO remember, however, is sitting in our rental Fiat Uno, zipping down the highway with my head on a swivel, straining my eyes for signs of unfamiliar automotive steel.

So then, what cars would you have seen if you were driving on a French highway in spring 1991? While I can’t be sure that I actually managed to record every single car on the road that day (the list seems a little short for a 160km trip), the answers are fairly unsurprising with the possible exception of a Pontiac Trans Sport sticking out like a sore dustbuster-shaped thumb. Here’s the final tally, as tallied by a 10-year-old boy (in other words, all errors were made 22 years ago by a child, in an unfamiliar country, in the backseat of a car doing 120km down the highway, so keep the pedantic corrections to a minimum if you please).