Monument shaping the townscape
02/10/2026
Winter should already be over as far as I'm concerned. I haven't made any significant efforts to get on my skis yet, but I wanted to buy new poles anyway, which hasn't happened yet. So I can wait until next season or rent some if I still feel the urge to hit the slopes.
I'm much more likely to feel the urge for summer and the warmth. For obvious reasons of course, then the classic season will finally start again.
In the past, I often had the opportunity to drive new cars in the south during the winter. I still remember some of these events years later, others have been almost completely forgotten. If there weren't still some pictures on my cell phone, my brain would have deleted them long ago. Most of the time it was due to the boring cars that had to be driven, although this was the case a few times in more recent times. Sometimes, however, it was simply due to the number of visits to Bercelona in Spain - very popular for new car presentations in winter - or Cascais in Portugal. In some years they were simply inflationary and I lost track. What I do remember, however, are the encounters with classic cars on such occasions. In Cascais, this was even a kind of recurring encounter with a Mercedes W123. The 300D at the Beco do Teatro was just part of it somehow, again and again. I greeted it like an old acquaintance. I don't know if it's still there.
But perhaps you feel the same way: in some places, you remember this or that car that was once there far more than the houses and monuments around it. In the case of the W123 300 Diesel, the word "monument" is probably not even overstated, even if critics might see it more as a monolith. In any case, it remained steadfastly in the same place and was always maintained and driven for years, and the diesel Daimler was probably steadfast too.
