Solvang ACVW Show, 2004

We went to an ACVW show soon after arriving in SoCal, which was held in the "quaint" wine-country town of Solvang, West-northwest of (or just plain North of, if you're a SoCalian) Santa Barbara.

Beetles with two-piece rear windows are called "Split-Windows", not to be confused with ≤1967 Busses, which have a two-piece windshield and are called "Splitties". The last Split-Window Beetle left Wolfsburg in 1953.

The market for Splitties has gone through the roof in the last several years, with prices on immaculate examples like this one approaching $50,000. If you count all the windows on this jaw-dropping late 50s Deluxe properly, you'll come up with 23.

This was the oldest VW at the show, a 1946 or 47 Beetle. (I don't remember which it was, but I remember it was the oldest.)

If a bus was built before February 1955, it has a giant rear hatch and is called a "Barndoor" (cf. this engine hatch with that on the Deluxe above). Note also the ridiculously small taillights, and lack of a rear bumper.

One might notice that I'm more apt to take pictures of ACVWs from behind rather than from in front. I suspect that this is an unconscious manifestation of my preference for how they look from the back. In any case, the above is an example of why one might wish I'd keep doing so--the beautifully ugly Type 3 Ghia (aka the Type 34). That is a face only a mother could love. This one had something in the windshield claiming it was the lowest-mileage Type 3 Ghia in existence, and was all original. I'd love to see Melissa tooling around in one of these things, but they're super rare. The two we saw at this show (both 1965s, I think) are the only two I've ever seen in person.

I didn't pay attention to the show's rules and thought we might enter Ludwig. (It's often cheaper to just pay to get the vehicle into the show--which includes free admission for whoever's in it--than to buy tickets and just be a spectator.) But it turns out he was seven years too young, as the show was only open to ACVWs from the "classic" era, 1967 and older. So he had to spend his time exiled in the parking lot with this 1973 (Ludwig at right).

More Early Adventures; Two Flats

(Being a continuance of old photos, scanned and posted while Melissa is away with the computer-friendly camera.)

Little kids like to sit in Ludwig's driver's seat, I think, because they can actually run the steering wheel and see out the windshield at the same time. This is our nephew Jacob, who is larger now.

Readers who have paid particular attention to this blog might have noticed that I refer to the line separating the waters flowing to the Pacific from those flowing to the Atlantic as the "Great Divide" instead of the more common, but ambiguous term "Continental Divide". The reasons for this would be interminably boring to the average reader; let me just say that North America has several continental divides, only one of which is the famous one that trends NW-SE through the Rockies, and that one is the Great Divide, though this sign in Wyoming (and every other sign I've ever seen) calls it the Continental Divide, as though it were the only one. Sigh.

Tires go bad with age, and they go really bad when they just sit flat for years and years. We were lucky to get as far as Mesquite Nevada on the driver's front tire before Arizona's section of I-15 and Ludwig committed it to the Sweet Hereafter. This tire, like every tire I'd ever blown before, started to feel weird, then started to smell weird, then started to sound weird, and then blew up. I therefore sensed its impending demise and managed to get Ludwig onto an exit ramp.

Ludwig's sacrifice to I-15 AZ

The passenger's front tire, upon which Bill was perched, gave no warning when it burst, at 60mph and in traffic, atop the Cajon Pass the next day. Here are my and Bill's butts just after we destroyed a small step-ladder for material to put on the jack so we could get Ludwig high enough to change the tire. Changing a tire on the shoulder of an LA freeway with traffic flying down a 5% grade past me is something I will avoid repeating if I can at all help it.

The day after dropping Bill off in Palm Springs we made it to Goleta without further incident. Here are Ludwig and Fang Fang at the apartment on Cannon Green Drive. Of course the older, junkier vehicle gets to live in the garage.

Long Long Ago

Ludwig's new drive axle (with new CVs) arrived yesterday and I was all primed to put it in today, but it's raining and raining so it's gonna have to wait. And, since Melissa's away and has absconded with the camera, I thought I'd scan in some old photos taken during those halcyon days when we didn't have a camera that ran on ones and zeroes, but instead one that operated via a stone-age process involving a special chemically-treated paper that was called, in the language of the time, "film".

This is where Ludwig sat from sometime in August? 1993 (when he went kaput on 02McDonald) until April 2004: in a metal barn on the Melcher farm North of Stanton Nebraska, where I grew up. That's Ludwig tucked away in the corner. His cellmates, from left to right were a 1989? VW Cabriolet, a 1974 Porsche 914-4, and a 1968 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Q: Which of these two vehicles are most similar? A: Ludwig's engine and transmission are completely interchangable with the little yellow Porsche's engine and transmission, the main differences being the Porsche powerplant is fuel injected and larger (2000cc cf. 1700cc, I think).

01Melcher and I moved him down to another metal barn which serves as Melcher's shop. The floor is really wet in this picture because I had just taken out all the interior and hosed out 11years of mouse excrement.

Common sense dictated that it'd be a good idea to give the brakes a decent going-over (the ability to stop is more important than the ability to go, to paraphrase the Idiot Book), so here's Ludwig with all his wheels off while I worked on them, with a lot of help from Groaner.

Just who in the hell are 01Melcher, 02McDonald, and Groaner anyway? Really, it's better you didn't know. Satisfy yourself with these images, the above of 01Melcher and the one below of Groaner.

Groaner in his natural habitat

These dudes and 02McDonald (who, like myself has a natural aversion to having his picture taken and hence is absent from this series) are some guys who I hang out with, drink beer with, and work (or "work") on cars with--often all at the same time--and who each were absolutely indispensible in Ludwig's resurrection.

This fresh 1800cc engine arrived from MOFOCO in Milwaukee ready to be dressed and put in Ludwig. I'm ambivalent about economy engine builders, but so far we've been satisfied with this engine. The next rebuild (we intend to own Ludwig forever, in case you couldn't tell) will be at our own hands.

Sorry about the butt-shot. After much trial and tribulation, all of which I take full responsibility for, Ludwig was drivable and we took him to Melissa's parents house in rural Pleasant Dale to put his interior back together. Melissa's parents really threw themselves into helping Ludwig along, and he wouldn't be where he is now without them. They also gave us a big chunk of carpet leftover from their living room and this is me cutting and fitting it. That awesome side-step below my feet (and prominent in other pictures here) is no longer with us, as I smashed it into a curb a few days later in Lincoln and pretty much destroyed it.

Putting the new canvas top on is not much fun, but a pneumatic stapler certainly helps. I was digging fiberglass out of my arms for days afterwards.

Melissa during the final stages of pop-top installation

One day after he was all outfitted, we arrived to see that Melissa's dad had waxed the camper, shining him shinier than he'd been in years. Though the headlight eyebrows don't allow him to properly express it (I like them, even if they make him look kind of pie-eyed), Ludwig here is pumped and ready to tackle the 1600mile trip ahead. Thank goodness he only had to wear those Godawful-looking Nebraska tags for about a month. I also must apologize for putting that WESTFALIA sticker on the wrong end of the bus--it's supposed to go on the back, I realized later.

Lake Como Again

Ludwig's still laid up, waiting on parts (scheduled to arrive Tuesday), but the Subaru is just as willing to get us someplace. Some friends had rented a huge cabin at Lake Como and invited us for the weekend to chill, so we loaded up Fang Fang and headed down US 93 into the Bitterroot valley.
The last time we'd been here it was covered with snow and ice, and the lake was frozen solid. Unsurprisingly, five months made quite a difference.
This set of pictures shows our hike to the far end of the lake to where the creek that feeds it dumps into the lake as a roaring rapid.

This view looks across the lake to the South. Little Rock Creek makes a nice waterfall (the white streaks left of center) at the end of a textbook-perfect, if not especially high, hanging valley. The Bitterroots were heavily glaciated during the last ice age (the Wisconsin Glaciation, I think, but it might've been an earlier one) and the ice left behind all kinds of features like this to prove it.

Just because I like this stuff so much here's another shot of that hanging valley, this time unobscured by the chick.

Melissa forded this little stream with her characteristic grace.

This osprey wasn't too happy about our troop marching past its nest. You see lots of osprey nests in Western Montana.

This is the lower part of the washing machine created by the creek as it enters the Western end of the lake.

I'm the yellow spot above center. You can see where the water is still a bit turbid below me. Actually, the canoe here was involved in a potentially serious accident right here a couple years ago, when its pilot got too close to the rapids and tipped it. Filled with water, a canoe will still float though it will weigh several hundred pounds. The current pushed him into a big dead tree and tacoed the canoe, putting him in the lake. He was lucky to get out, as the water here is never very warm. The canoe is repaired (obviously), and those light patches are the scars it earned in the incident.

We did our first-time canoeing together the next day, and after some initial steering issues, kind of got the hang of sloppy canoeing (viz., steering by switching sides, not by using correct paddle strokes). Melissa enjoyed it enough to suggest that we rent a canoe sometime and take it to nice gentle lake for some practice. This time, I won't fail to get a shot of old Ludwig wearing the boat.