Friday, February 13, 2009

Do I change our blog's title?

Well, for the first time since Craig and I have been together we are a one VW family. We’ve always had at least 2 VWs…sometimes three. This does present an interesting obstacle as the title of our blog at least in part suggests that we have more than one Volkswagen. I guess if that’s my biggest concern, then life is really good.

We sold Lady yesterday, which made me really sad…it may be freakish, but I think I get more attached to cars than I do to people. I had to get to the bank ASAP after selling her, not so much because I was uncomfortable having so much cash, but because I knew that paying off the credit card would make me happy. There’s nothing I love more than that $0 balance. (Okay, that’s so not true, I love lots of things more than that, but you get what I’m trying to say.)

Last weekend we were trying to decide whether we should sell Penny or not and decided that we needed to go look at some bay window campers (I mean, what helps the brainstorming juices flow more than car shopping?) We have, of course been in several of these before, but never with the specific goal of determining whether we liked Penny, or our potential bay window camper better. We went and saw a Westy that was about what we could afford. It was a ’75, and while the exterior was totally beat, the interior was really cool. We were digging the idea of getting a bay window—when it occurred to me that the ’75 we had seen was only 6 years older than our Penny. 6 years!

I always think of busses as falling into 3 categories—ancient (splitties), really old (bay windows) and practically fresh off the line (Vanagons). I forget that Penny was made during only the second year in the history of Vanagons. It had never really hit me before that Penny’s body and interior are in incredibly awesome shape for being an ’81 (I’ll do the math for you, that is 28 years old)! Add that to her freshly rebuilt engine and tranny and well, we’d be kind of dumb to sell her (I’m totally confident that I’ll have to eat those words sometime within…three years.)

We cleaned her interior and took her to the car wash, and man, she cleans up good. So now, we’ve got some work cut out for us because, yeah, she looks really good, but let’s face it, 29 years of wear have taken a toll. Our first project is debatable—either work on the engine seal or finish the curtains (yes, the ones I started like a year ago).

0 comments: