Big Sur

When we lived in Goleta, California I went on a short trip with a three girlfriends. For some odd reason, I never made a blog post about the trip until now. So, be warned that this post might be a bit weird. The recount that follows will be my memory of what stood out from the trip, rather than an accurate and complete account of the events that transpired.

The destination of our trip was Kirk Creek Campground, near Big Sur California. I drove the entire way, obviously, since Mitch didn't go on this trip. Somewhere around Pismo Beach, the 101 (US Hwy 101) divides and there was a huge boulder in the middle. For some reason, roads built around rocks, and mountains or hills cut to allow road access, always leaves an impression on me. I think the appeal is that it's a real life example of Man vs. Nature that's more subtle than, say, an earthquake or tsunami.

Traveling in Ludwig is pretty different than traveling in other vehicles, in a very practical sense. Slow driving, slow turning, slow braking, slow accelerating, and pulling over frequently to allow faster traffic to pass are all par for the course. I was extremely self-conscious and apologetic to my traveling companions, feeling as if I was expecting an unreasonable amount of patience from them, given that they might not have known what they were getting themselves in to agreeing to carpool in a 1974 bread-loaf Volkswagen Campmobile. Nevertheless, my nervousness was unwarranted as they were  relaxed, and seemed to actually enjoy the ride. However, the crappiness of our old tires was painfully obvious on the PCH (this trip happened before we upgraded Ludwig's tires to the Hankook RAO8s). He handled like I was like driving a bread-loaf on a waterbed.

This was our campsite. And this is Maura. She's wielding a ginormous bottle of booze she got for Mother's Day from her sons. Such good boys.

This old bus was parked directly across from our campsite. The bus wasn't a "real" camper. That is, it wasn't sold as a camper. It was a bus that someone gutted, and made some whacky interior and stuffed it inside, and then used the bus as a camper. It's lovely that VWs are so easily customized. Attached to the front of the bus is a wooden box, whose only purpose as far as I could tell was to hold a sauce pan as seen in the photo above. The bus's only occupant was one unkempt 50s-something man that seemed to spend most of his time hiding out in the bus. He exited the bus once to dump some gasoline in the fire pit, light a match and throw it down, WHOOOOSH!, eat something from the sauce pan, watch the flames for about 5 minutes, place the sauce pan on the wooden box, and retreat in to the back of the bus. The event was extremely short-lived and memorable.

This was the lot of us. Erin, Thuy, Maura, and me (L to R). I'm not really the tallest, Erin actually is, the ground was sloped. The four of us are now scattered across the country in four different states.

This is the view of the campsite from one hike we took. If you click on the photo to view a larger version, you can catch a glimpse of Ludwig. I remember thinking that if I slipped and fell I might fall and roll and roll and roll all the way down in to the ocean. Scary.

This is Maura and Erin, on a different hike from the bird's eye view of Ludwig. See how crazy steep the hill is? Don't lose your footing, ladies.

This second hike led to a beautiful beach. The sights and sounds were incredible. I took a short video so I could share a less awesome than real-life version of the world's largest rock tumbler with Mitch when I got home.

At our campsite, I was horrified to find this:

a hideous creature, the mole cricket. Gross. We found these in our condo TWICE when living in California. They are horrifying, giant, and make a hell of a lot of noise when scratching around behind a bookcase. Disgusting.

But ocean + mountains + sunset always makes for a pretty ending to a camp-out.

On the way back to Goleta, we stopped at the beach near San Simeon where elephant seals are a popular tourist attraction. It was strangely awesome that the beasts were performing so near a giant permanent viewing area.

Yea, it was a pretty good trip.

THE END

(dS / dt) ≥ 0, or, Things Fall Apart

A couple weekends ago I took a trip up Montana Hwy 83 with my friend Beau to do some ice fishing on good old Lake Alva (here's another shot of the lake from about the same spot as the shot below).

Lake Alva, 10am, 24 January 2009. The ice was between 12 and 18 inches thick, meaning we could've--not that I would've--easily driven Ludwig on it, had the road been plowed all the way down to the shore. Beau likes pyromania to be the first order of business on the ice, so we took his chainsaw into the woods and sawed chunks off of some dead timber for a laketop fire. The saw flew to pieces in his hands as we finished getting a sledful of wood, enough to get us through the day but certainly not enough for the evening.

Beau and Bryan (who joined us during the day for a bit) ate these 10,000 calorie bacon and egg sandwiches, while I just settled for bacon on toast. My PBR tallboy is thawing out on the griddle because once a beer gets opened in these conditions, in about five minutes it's a beer slushie and in ten it's a beercicle. That portable fireplace was another casualty of the weekend, collapsing as we hauled it off the lake.

We were skunked all morning and into the afternoon, when we decided to move East about twenty yards, closer to where the stream empties into the lake. After that we had bites galore. This is Beau and the nice brookie he pulled out.

I had plenty of bites, but it wasn't until the sun started to go down and it really started to get cold that I finally caught this little brook trout. Notice my U.S. Air Force-issue arctic parka, a gift (along with an awesome pair of matching pants) from my father-in-law. I cleaned and bagged the fishie and we headed to Ludwig, leaving our gear on the ice for retrieval in the morning. I'm not wearing gloves because I'm about to clean him, which involves bare-handed work with a knife and 32-degree water.

Since we didn't have enough wood to get a Ludwigside blaze going, we thought we'd drive into Seeley Lake to buy some firewood at a gas station. Climbing the hill out of the campground, a link on Ludwig's tire chains broke and rendered the passenger-side half of his motive power useless. I was close enough to the main road that we were okay, but there was no way we'd get back out of the campground with just one chain if we went down there again. We were wary of camping along the main highway, so we went into Seeley Lake and parked behind the post office for the night. After a few beers at The Filling Station, we went back to Ludwig, where Beau stuffed himself into his -40F sack and I curled up under two sleeping bags.

The next morning Ludwig was loath to fire up, so we called AAA for a jump. Curious as to how cold we actually were, we asked the tow truck guy what the overnight low was. He didn't know how cold it'd gotten but said, "It's zero right now", and this was 9:30am. I looked it up later and saw the overnight low had been -13F. I'd say that's probably the coldest night I've ever spent out-of-doors (or "out-of-building", rather), though with Melissa on this trip it was plenty cold too. After the jump Ludwig was fine so we drove back to the frozen lake, gathered all our gear, and schlepped it the 2/3 mile back to where we parked him on the road. After a quick stop back in town for a snack however, Ludwig wouldn't start for anything.

Suspecting the battery, we took a walk over to an auto parts store. I was amazed that it was even open, considering this is a small town and it was Sunday morning. We installed it without much trouble, but it didn't help; it just helped him turn over faster.

After much troubleshooting of the ignition system and finding it satisfactory we called the tow truck guy again, prepared to shell out the big bucks for a 55-mile tow to Missoula. The guy discouraged me from doing it, saying he'd hate for me to pay $150 for the tow just to find out we had a $50 fix on our hands. He towed Ludwig to his shop (also open, to our surprise) to give us better conditions for a look-see.

He was one of those guys that warms an ACVWer's heart. He put Ludwig up on the lift and let us do half the work, which some might've found annoying, but not me. I'd much rather work on Ludwig (or anything, really) with the mechanic than just sit around in the waiting room reading Sports Illustrated or whatever. 

An engine needs three things to work: fuel, spark, and air. In the parking lot we'd already eliminated lack of spark as the problem. In the shop we found that fuel was getting where it needed to go. So, as demanded by disjunctive syllogism, we popped the air filter off of the total p.o.s. Weber carburetor that I can't wait to replace and found a lot of water. Ludwig had been ingesting fine snow by the cupful and it had gotten into the carb, making it very hard for him to start. It's hard enough for him to warm up in extreme cold with his stupid stupid center-mounted carb, and the water in with the gas was just too much for him. With the filter off and a squirt of ether, he sputtered to life and started to run well, after the gas/water mixture burned away and he began burning just dinosaur bones again. With a word to replace the air filter soon and a bill for $30, Clearwater Towing and Repair sent us packing down the road, and Ludwig managed without further incident. 

Over the weekend, these things succumbed to entropy: a chainsaw, three cans of Olympia (froze), an ice ladle, a lighter, one bottle of Beau's homebrew (froze and broke), one tire chain, the portable firepit, Ludwig's battery, his positive post clamp, his air filter, and any last tiny shreds of faith I had in the utility of Weber Progressive carburetors on these vehicles.

(miles 219,460-219,615)

23,926

Eliana, Marc, and their '78 Westy Valentina wound up their epic cross-continent trip last week. Regular readers of this blog may remember that they spent some time with us last Summer.
The trip wasn't without more than its fair share of mechanical troubles, but we hope (and suspect) that they aren't soured on ACVW ownership altogether. Congratulations on 243 days well spent.

Ancient History

Other bus bloggers know a lot more about the history of their beasts than we do about Ludwig. From what we've gleaned from his M-codes, Ludwig was built on 24 October 1973 and was shipped to the States soon after, landing at San Francisco. Between then and 1991, we don't know much of anything about his adventures, other than that he spent time in the Omaha area, and then briefly in Norfolk Nebraska.

Imagine our surprise when we quite accidentally stumbled upon this shining gem which, judging by the Phillies Blunt tshirt and amount of hair, dates from sometime in the Spring or Summer 1993. Not long afterward, the guy in the photo managed to exploit a metallurgical flaw and break Ludwig's unbreakable Type IV crankshaft in half. This is the earliest picture of Ludwig of which we are aware.