It was late on a Saturday afternoon, nothing was open (remember those days?). So all I could do was push the car into its final resting spot. This picture was taken on Sunday, after church, you can’t see the damage as its on the other side. I was smiling on the outside, but I sure wasn’t smiling on the inside. I was mad, really mad. But what can you do, stuff happens and you gotta learn to roll with it. This was my first hard lesson and man did I want my Yamaha 750 Special back, who cares about the Dodge! On Monday, my Dad called the insurance company to see what could be done. They called the local Chrysler dealer, as they had been the Fiat dealer in the 70s before Fiat pulled out of North America. Strange how that worked out, it seems many Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth dealers had the Fiat franchise in the 70s and in the end Fiat buys Chrysler. Anyway, back to the story… the dealer didn’t have access to parts and they thought the best option would be to order a complete engine from Fiat and have it shipped from Italy. Since there was no “dealer” network anymore, they had no idea what parts might have been sitting all over Canada. My luck there was a complete engine only hours away, but there was no way to know. So the price to get the engine from Italy, including the shipping and installation at the dealer was more than I paid for the car, so I basically got a refund.

Since my Dad really didn’t like the car, I think he may have orchestrated the outcome or at least heavily influenced how it all went down. On Monday afternoon, before I got home from work, the car was gone, never to be seen again. I even went to a few scrap yards to look, I wanted to buy her back, but all to no avail. I even thought I could drop a Honda Civic engine in there, being front wheel drive, just drop the whole thing in. There’s an idea, wonder if anybody ever did that:)

A few weeks later, I went off to college in a 1978 Dodge Omni, that was quite the come down from my hot little Fiat.