Santa Maria VW Show, Summer 2005

Ancient history, unearthed recently on our external hard drive.

The Santa Barbara Channel off port with Melissa at the helm, along US 101. A map of the trip is here.

The Gaviota Tunnel which, it seemed to me, delimited the spiritual Northern border of the LA malignancy metropolis, and of SoCal in general.

Crewcab Vanagon>cool.

The cast is an artifact of a bike wreck in Isla Vista a few days before (broken scaphoid).

This was one of the actual Beetles used in the most recent regurgitation of the Herbie series, starring Lindsay Lohan, aka LiLo. Don't I look uncomfortable in this picture? Well, I was. I remember this car's owner was really insistent that I get my photo taken in his car. It was super weird. 


Ludwig was an entrant in this show (curiously, the only bay window there if I remember correctly) but there're no pictures to prove it because the camera batteries died.

Westside Missoula VW Show '10

No, there wasn't really a VW show in our unassuming neighborhood. After washing Ludwig the other weekend I popped all the lower hatches to give him a good dry. I thought he looked like a car show entrant, all shiny and opened up and all.

First Place!

New Year's Resolution

My own resolution, such that it is, is to follow a certain other blogger's example and post more often.

While the one-two punch of some truly brutal weather and our beaming one year-old (rounded up to the nearest year, anyway) has kept Ludwig in the stable and us out of the outdoors most of the Winter, there's still really no shortage of things we can write about. To wit:

Below are photos I have unabashedly cribbed from the Omaha VW Club's archives, specifically from the 2004 Show-n-Shine at the outlet mall in Gretna. We take no responsibility for the quality of the pictures.

There's a crew like this at every ACVW gathering, I swear.

Poor Beetles have to put up with being painted such godawful colors.

That's me at far right sporting my Specter Off-Road tshirt.

Melissa and I drove and entered 02McDonald's 1960 Double Door (above; name unknown), as McDonald was trying to sell it, plus Ludwig wasn't quite up-and-running.

Double Doors (the term refers to the fact that it has cargo doors on both sides which can be opened up such that a well-trained child on a minibike could jump it right on through the bus) being somewhat rare and desirable, we had several interested parties and fielded a lot of questions, but nothing came of it. The bus was sold some months later to a buyer in the U.K.

Attention to anyone considering the case of splitty (1949-1967) v. bay window (1968-1979): splitties are no doubt more charming in an ugly duckling sort of way, but both of us having driven the DD and Noel, we unhesitatingly report that bays are waaaaaay better to drive in virtually all respects.

This was the raffle bus. The paint job was kind of sloppy, but the engine was brand new. If we'd won it, I imagine this you'd be reading "Ludwig & Mr. Mustard's Adventures" right now.

Hell-Ride '01

At long last, the story from my and 02McDonald's July 2001 roadtrip from Lincoln Nebraska to Montgomery New York (and back) in his 1960 VW Singlecab.
In looking through the photos to include in this post, I was struck that not a one was taken from the moving truck. Ah well.
Initially we'd intended to stay off of interstates as much as possible, in order to better see the world, and because the top speed on this rig was about 60mph. Upon setting out however, we agreed to exempt the Hawkeye State from this rule, and took I-80 straight through it as fast as we could so we wouldn't get any Iowa on us. Inside Illinois after crossing the Mississippi at Quad Cities, we hopped on US 6 until our first stop at Illini State Park, across the river from Marseilles. I like to tell the story of this particular camping experience, so here goes: we pulled in late and were starving so McDonald set up his stove while I set up the tent. The campground abuts the Illinois River and this being mid-Summer there was no shortage of flying bugs. Moths, various beetles, and mosquitoes alike were attracted to the light of the cooking flame, confounding his efforts to make us a couple grilled cheeses by getting themselves hopelessly stuck in the cheese. Eventually hunger overtook our squeamishness--and McDonald's patience for picking the insects out one by one--so we ate the sandwiches, bugs and all.
Our time the first day wasn't as good as we'd've liked, and neither of us could be accurately described as early risers, so the next day we gave in to the interstate and took it from Chicago onward, except for a shortcut we took (at my suggestion) through some of Gary Indiana's worse neighborhoods to avoid construction delays. We were way late by this time, so interstate it was through all of Indiana and into Ohio until...

...pulling off to get gas in Elmore Ohio, I (or was it McDonald?) pressed the clutch pedal all the way to the floor without getting the expected action at the other end. The cable was broken. McDonald did thirty miles of clutchless driving (including circling in a parking lot while waiting for a red light) and got us to East Harbor State Park, where we set up camp and commenced opening some brews. The next morning he phoned Cram Foreign Auto Parts in Omaha and had a new clutch cable overnighted to us at the campsite. We took the turn of events as a sign that we needed to drink beer all day long during our unintended day off, becoming minor celebrities at the campground in the process (the general state of the truck and its Alaska plates helped). One guy even spent most of his honeymoon sitting at our campfire drinking beer with us. Another guy we drank with until early in the morning almost talked McDonald into getting a tattoo with him. The cable arrived on day four of the trip and was installed without delay, since we were now a day behind and needed to get all the way to Syracuse New York by that night.

Syracuse was where our friend Eric was completing grad school and part of the excuse for the trip was to see him. He and his wife Reagan were very accommodating, so we let Eric take Noel (that's the truck's name) for a spin around his neighborhood (Reagan wouldn't go near it). He was horrified by the gaping holes in the floorboards, holes that during the trip consumed, among other things, my big plastic mug, a calculator, and probably about 10,000 cigarette butts. Noel is a rusty beast.

Finally after another night in the Catskills, we arrived at the Tri-States (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut I guess) VW Show and entered Noel in Class 'L', pre-1967 non-camper Type IIs. This red-on-white '66 was the only other entrant in the class, so Noel got second place.

Another shot of the Class 'L' entrants. We thought the guy with the nicely-restored '66 was a little miffed that the completely unrestored '60 was parked next to him and so was in most of the shots of his bus.

"Hippie" bus from Jersey.

I hope this immaculate '72 actually gets used and isn't just a trailer queen.

What ACVW show is complete without Beetles upon Beetles?

I can't believe that someone would put such awful wheels on such a nice Oval. Note the tailpipes.

It's either a 1999 or 2000 Beetle, believe it or not.

Sleeper?

That night we headed into New Jersey and set up camp in High Point State Park. The ranger told us to stow our food well, as this part of Jersey has the highest concentration of Black Bears East of the Rockies. I thought this was pretty amazing, given that we were only a little more than ninety minutes outside of Manhattan.

Our last sight-seeing-y thing was a stop at the Latrobe Brewery, home of Rolling Rock (or at least it was when we were there; it ain't anymore). I used to drink Rolling Rock almost exclusively, and always found it amazing that you never knew how a given bottle might taste--sometimes skunky, sometimes smooth, sometimes bitter. I suspected that they never actually wrote the recipe down, but we didn't take a real tour so I'll never know. As we pulled into the lot, we were 133 miles into that tank of gas (Noel didn't have a gas gauge, so we wrote the mileage of each fill on the dashboard in pencil).

The rest of the trip was mechanically uneventful, except that the passenger-side door stopped cooperating someplace in Indiana and had to be strapped shut. During a downpour in Illinois the cab was taking on so much water that it was running--not dripping, running--down my arm as I drove. Hell-Ride '01 ended after a 14-hour drive (700 miles) from Kil-So-Quah State Recreation Area in Indiana back to Lincoln.

I should've taken more pictures.

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).