from a local motoring website.
Wed Dec 07, 2011 4:53 pm
I give up. Parked in an open parking lot in Cape Town at about 5pm yesterday, when I returned around 23:30 the car was gone. Sigh.
Thu Dec 08, 2011 10:20 am
Parked in Cape University of Technology open parking lot, and then did the Twilight Run. Came back to find my car missing. It was an unattended parking lot, but I didn't think they would steal it with all the people around. I tried parking the car in a more secure area first, but everything was taken already because of the 'Run. Friends of mine went back to their cars (parked next to mine) at about 10pm, and the car was still there.
Don't have shortfall insurance no... Stupid me. This is going to hurt.
Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:09 pm
They found my car, 2 blocks away from the parking lot where it was stolen. All my personal effects are still inside, windows closed, no visible damage whatsoever. Must go and fetch it tomorrow, but I think this is good news! Not quite sure what to make of this though...
Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:21 pm
Lol! It does seem like I moved it and then forgot, eh! We all moved around as a group, and it was a couple of us that went back to our cars, when we saw mine was missing.
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not quite as bad, but 25 odd years ago I went to Wembley stadium for a Bruce Springsteen concert( it was fantastic), and because Charles and Di were going to see Dire Straits at the arena the same night it was chaos. I managed to find a space in a side road. I'd driven and there on my own so my friends were not too happy when after the concert it took nearly 2 hours to find it and drive home
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Not quite as bad also but also 25 years ago having had a day out with the boss around Manchester in sub-zero temperatures, I walked him to the departure gate at the airport and couldn't find the car. I was in my shirt sleeves like any normal rep. and feeling the cold. 2 hours later I was perished and shivering so much I could scarcely put the key in the lock when I eventually spotted the car. I'd changed car the previous week and had been looking for completely the wrong vehicle. Must have walked past it a dozen times.
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thank the lord for remote locking, flashing indicators and beeps...
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>> thank the lord for remote locking, flashing indicators and beeps...
Doesn't help at Bristol balloon fiesta
You park the car in an enormous, featureless field in daylight and return to try and find it in the dark. There's people wandering around the thousands of cars muttering, with flashing indicators and beeps going off all over the place...
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>> Doesn't help at Bristol balloon fiesta
Your car will have sunk in the mud anyway!
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>>Your car will have sunk in the mud anyway!
A little dampness doesn't bother some of us: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J488pPePZzk&feature=share
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>> thank the lord for remote locking, flashing indicators and beeps...
>>
If you hold the key to your head it increases the range!
The US system of having an alarm trigger button on the remote fob is *very* handy in the theme park car-parks!
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If you lose your BMW iPhone's your friend !
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Dropped some one off at Gatwick once, took 30 mins plus to find the car ...
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Friends elderly mum with failing memory cells regularly went through the following senario.
Drove to the nearby supermarket, did shopping, walked home and then reported the car stolen.
The kind BiB took her back to the carrpark more than once.
Eventually my friend & her GP arranged for her to give up driving.
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Came back to Manchester airport, teminal 2, very early one February morning, and found every car in the long term car park covered in a very heavy frost - 4000 identical snowy white cars.......
The long term at Stanstead is a bit of a nightmare if you remember the zone address wrongly........
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In a huge carpark just tie a helium balloon to the aerial. Ideally inflated.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Tue 13 Dec 11 at 13:04
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A mate told me this one.
He and some friends went to see the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Expecting heavy traffic they came up with a cunning plan. Arrive early, leave as soon as the race finishes.
On arrival they were directed into a field to park. They started to walk to the track and then realised it could be tricky to find the car once everyone else turned up and the overflow parking field was full of cars. To ensure they could find it, they carefully took sightings from the car to various trees around the edge of the field.
When the race finished, they dashed out to find a slight problem. Which of the thirty or so fields with trees dotted around the edge and full of cars was the one they'd fixed the position of their car within......?
A couple of hours' searching proved fruitless and they ended up hanging around until a solitary car of the right colour became visible in one of the fields.
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Silverstone remains the only place I have ever "lost" my car. As in found myself wandering round the wrong car park without realising.
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30 yrs ago (no excuse of old age then)
I knew where my car was in the multi-storey carpark in Torquay 3rd floor of a 4 x storey block
A few hours later I looked for carpark and could not find it - I was told there was a 8/9 storey car park and a 3 x storey.................turns out that I had parked from 1 side of the 8/9 storey carpark where I had come in from the high side at level 6!
Taxi took me there.
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The 'lingo's reasonably easy spot as it's tall and even if I cannot make out the digits it's three letter/two number personal plate stands out. The Xantia, even with bike racks on, is just another sleek dark coloured eurobox.
Airshows are only time I've come close to really having lost a car. Unless I can fix postion accurately against a unique landmark a duster tied to the aerial acts as identifier.
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Handy feature I have turned on for my car.... leaving home lights which come on in the dark when you unlock it. Might not help if its under snow or you're looking in the wrong car park! :-)
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I used to commute to work in Liverpool by bus.
One day, because I had somewhere to go after work I took the car in, and parked it on a bombsite car park, for about £3 all day (it was a long time ago).
During the day, my afterwork activity got cancelled, so I left work at the normal time and went home - - on the bus!
I only remembered when I got home and found my car missing. Then had to retrace my steps (40mins on the bus) to retrieve the car - it would not have been there in the morning!
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If parking in a huge carpark, when walking away from my car I stop walking about 10 cars away, turn around and work out the car's position relative to its surroundings. On fireworks night at Alton Towers* it was 2 cars away from the temporary floodlights in car park J.
Being a petrolhead I take note of any interesting cars as we're walking away through the car park. I point them out to whoever I'm walking with, in the hope that at least some of the cars will still be there on the way back. I can thank the owners of a rollcage'd orange MINI Cooper and a Ssangyong Rodius taxi for providing waypoints the last time :)
*I wouldn't go there on fireworks night again.
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When I park in a new place, I remove my trusty Nokia 5800 from my pocket, open the satnav app.
I then save my current position to 'favourites'
To find my car, I reopen the satnav app, ask for 'walk to' directions to 'car'
That will normally get me to within 10metres of the car!
Easy!
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>> To find my car, I reopen the satnav app, ask for 'walk to' directions to 'car'
I did that at Nottingham Goose Fair, after parking in a less than salubrious sidestreet, in the dark, some way from the fairground. Worked a treat.
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I tend to map my route by various cars...
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>> I tend to map my route by various cars...
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That's OK... as long as they dont leave before you do...
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>> >> I tend to map my route by various cars...
>> >>
>> That's OK... as long as they dont leave before you do...
Or stolen, specially at the Goose fair.
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Many years ago we were on holiday in a friends Austin 1100 touring Holland. The car was parked in the middle of Delft outside a tiny cafe. We had accomodation in the roof space. I woke up and looked out of the window and saw a large market in full swing and no car.
We eventually found it a block away, still locked and safe.
I guess the BIG market lads just lifted the back of the 1100 and moved it a bit like a wheelbarrow.
Sat Nav would not have helped find it! :-)
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I had a similar experience in Ypres a few years back. Forgot that they had a market in the town square (which doubles as a car park) on saturdays, fortunately our hotel room overlooked the square and the sound of the market setting up woke me and i just made it in time to stop the car being towed away.
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Many moons ago, a mate of mine inherited a Triumph Acclaim from his mother when she gave up driving and which he decided to use a second car. He went out in it one time to meet some mates and ended up going out on a bender, so left if parked up somewhere.
Several weeks later, Mother came to visit and asked about the beloved Acclaim. To his surprise it wasn't parked outside the house as he expected. It then dawned on him the car was presumably still standing somewhere in Manchester where he'd left it previously. Exactly where that was though, he couldn't remember. To the best of my knowledge he never found the car again.
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A slight drift ... Back in the 70's, I parked my cream Zephyr 4 mrk 111 ouside a pub and went in for a few golden throat charmers, we came out later, jumped in the car and I noticed (couldn't not!) that the interior light was red?
Turns out I'd got into a white Zephyr and of course my key fitted ... being a Ford.
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In 1967 , Celtic were the first British team to win the European Cup. It was held in Lisbon.
Legend has it that after the game, the fans were piled into the Glasgow planes without much checking and sent on their way. On arriving back at Glasgow airport, one supporter rapidly sobered up when he remembered that he had driven all the way to Lisbon from Glasgow.......
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>> In 1967 , Celtic were the first British team to win the European Cup. It
>> was held in Lisbon.
>>
>> Legend has it that after the game, the fans were piled into the Glasgow planes
>> without much checking and sent on their way. On arriving back at Glasgow airport, one
>> supporter rapidly sobered up when he remembered that he had driven all the way to
>> Lisbon from Glasgow.......
Rumour has it that over a thousand Celtic supporters still haven't made it home from that match
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Charged with the task of recovering a maroon Polo by a local garage, I took the key and went to the address. I unlocked it and jumped in to back it out of the driveway.
The key wouldn't turn in the ignition. Getting out, I chanced to see an identical car over the road. The key started that one !
Doh !
Ted
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Many years ago, the same friends in the earlier 1100 incident , came ,along with SWMO, to Ireland. We hired two red Escorts with number plates the same except for the last digit.
Yes, the first morning we all jumped into our vehicles and both would not start.
We eventually sussed, prior to RTFC ( contract) that our seats had changed colour from brown to black & vv. Oh how we chuckled.
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Come to think of it, twenty plus years ago when I lived in Watford, the car saw little use from one week's end to the next. Mrs B and I both worked in central London and we'd quickly leaving disposable pushbikes at the station was, in every possible way, a better option than driving.
No parking outside the house so we'd come back from a weekend away and leave it in one of several 'usual places' in adjacent side streets. Two weeks later we'd panic slightly and take ten minutes finding it.
Another time a stranger knocked on our door to tell us we needed to move our car as the Council needed to resurface underneath it; fortunately he'd clocked us as owners of the car and regulars in the Italian Deli and noted where we lived.
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When I lived in a rented flat in Marylebone, W1, I had a prized residents' parking permit.
It allowed you to park in a handful of marked bays which were dotted around the surrounding streets.
The problem was you tended to have to park in a different bay each time.
Several times I walked to a bay, only to find it was one I'd used a day or two earlier, and the car was somewhere else.
I visited the Great Yorkshire Show at Harrogate a couple of years ago.
A lot of people there tie carrier bags to the aerials of their cars in a bid to make them stand out.
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Many years ago when leaving a fast food joint where I had just enjoyed a hearty breakfast, I attempted to gain access to a Ford Mustang that was identical to the one that I had hired, and was parked just out of sight about 20 yards away.
It was a bit embarrassing, as the burly owner (who was in the same restaurant) had spotted me, and I only escaped a good thumping by quickly taking him to my own car and opening the drivers door with the keys I had in my hand.
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Epic fail - wotspur
