Armchair tourism, part 1

I have no problem admitting my addiction to the Google Maps street view feature.Quite honestly, I think it's the best thing to ever happen to the internet.I've seen much of Florida and probably half of Taiwan just from sitting behind a screen, clicking away at the arrows. Chances are i'll never make it to Japan, France, New Zealand, sweden, Netherlands, the UK, Norway, Poland, Brazil, etc etc etc but I can see a real, accurate, complete view of them all just by firing up the computer.And of course, there are car sightings.For sure, there are major shortcomings in that department. They are still images, so you cant see cars moving every few seconds like some decent webcams show.They are 1-dimensional.And many are pretty low-resolution, so cars parked farther away or partially hidden are not very visible, like they would be in person. Still, I'm not complaining. You can see cars that were driving by or parked as the Google car was photographing the area, so there are still unlimited opportunities to catch something interesting. Best of all, even if you don't see any interesting or notable cars during your armchair tourism session, you'll at least see some beautiful views.I will randomly pick a city to look up and just start looking around,usually based on locales I'd enjoy looking at.
I could not resist Bogalusa, Louisiana. With a name like that, I just had to check it out. In that humid, hurricane-prone state, I didn't expect to find much.But then I saw this:
http://goo.gl/maps/UwQAI

Sadly, this car and the abandoned pickup next to the house appear to be gone in the more recent aerial view. Its an Isuzu I-mark with the more attractive hatchback body style.I'd be surprised if more than 500 of these still survive in North America.It was quite a world vehicle.From 1976-79, they were sold as the Buick/Opel, since Isuzu had not yet started selling vehicles under their own name stateside (and even after that, they were obscure and were such a small percentage of the market most people forgot they were around).They sold poorly until being redesigned in the mid-80s.Rebadged versions under the name Chevrolet and Geo spectrum were able to find these cars more buyers.However, these earlier versions were on their own and completely overlooked in the USA. Elsewhere, things were better.The notchback versions were popular taxicabs in the Philippines (under their original name, Isuzu Gemini).They were sold as Holdens in Australia. And in Brazil it was called the Chevette. They can still be seen in that country in pretty good numbers.Truth be told, I'd be sadder about the demise of these cars if they weren't still available elsewhere as they are.They are not valuable or collectible, but extreme rarity makes them interesting, and capturing one on film in 2008 (the date of this image) was an unlikely occurance.Hopefully it's still around somewhere, but if anyone needs parts for one, they'll have to have them imported.