I know many people who purchase a new car every couple years. My folks were not like that, hence it’s easier for me to remember the vehicles that I rode around in, and, subsequently drove. The final car I wrote about in my last post was the blue Beetle. My memories of that car end with my dad telling me he had to get rid of it before the seized spark plug needed replacing. I then remember being at the Mezzetti Volkswagen dealership in Fremont, CA and coming home in a brand-new bus (Type II / Transporter). Like the one in the photo above (not the exact vehicle), it was blue with a white roof. The interior, however, was black with black vinyl seats and black rubber floor mats.
Soon after getting the bus home, my dad started to make modifications to accommodate our travelling and camping needs. He transformed the sleeping platform that was used in the aforementioned Beetles into one that replaced the bus’s back (third row) seat and extended the floor over the engine compartment. This made a nice full-size bed for my parents. Then he added a couple thermos-holding straps that were just cut-down bicycle wheel inner-tubes screwed to the inner sheetmetal of the bus near the front passenger’s seat. This kept the water jug and coffee thermos in place while travelling. The piece-de-resistance was the camping box. Dad constructed a long plywood box that replaced the middle seat when we went camping. It was roughly the same height and depth as the stock seat, but it extended across the entire car rather than just the two-thirds the factory seat span. It had four legs that could screw on or off, but I remember that most of the time, when we were camping, it sat on the campsite’s picnic table. The box had a flip-down front door that exposed multiple storage compartments while serving as a kitchen counter.
The trip I remember most in the bus was one into Canada. Part of the trip was passing through Yellowstone and Glacier Nationals Parks, but the portion I remember most vividly was driving on a forestry trunk road in Alberta. I can’t remember the length of this all-gravel road, but I do remember getting a flat tire nearing the halfway point. Fortunately, we then came upon the only service station between the start and the end of the road where they put in a tube so we’d have a good spare tire again.
One time my folks loaned the car to my Uncle Vic to do some sightseeing. Since it was summer and I was out of school, I tagged along with him and his family. I found it amusing that he had a LOT of difficulty getting the car to go into first gear, so most of the starts were made in second with significant clutch slipping.
Once I learned how to drive a stick, I was able to borrow the bus to haul around my group of friends. This was in the days before every family owned a mini-van, so it was something special taking seven to a movie in one vehicle.
Three engines and over three hundred thousand miles later, my dad finally sold the bus back in the early 2000s. I’m sure he only got a few hundred for it. Given it’s rust-free-ness, today that bus would probably fetch five grand or so.
