The Riviera Curse

We love that Penny is a Riviera—really—we do. When we bought her, we didn’t know a ton about Westys and Rivieras, just that the camper conversions were done by two different companies (Westfalia and Riviera respectively in case that’s not obvious) and we knew that Riviera tops pop straight up and Westys pop up at an angle.

The thing we did not at all anticipate is the near impossibility of finding replacement camper parts for Penny. One of the biggest differences between Westys and Rivieras is that VW contracted with Westfalia to build Westys, while Rivieras were shipped from the factory to distributors as standard (non-camper) busses/vans and the distributor contracted with Riviera to do the camper conversion.

This has caused the following complications.

1) Historically, I’ve found that a lot of the really solid information about VW history comes from the UK. I’ll bet that a lot would come from Germany too, but my ability to read the German language is impaired (okay, nonexistant). The point being that since Riviera conversions were done in the US, there isn’t much information coming from Europe on the subject.

2) Also, there isn’t much information in the US. I searched for info about Rivieras on Wikipedia. I realize that Wiki is not a reliable source of information, but this further reinforces my point. Even Wikipedia, where you can find information about EVERYTHING, only has this to say about Riviera.
“Riviera Motors was the Beaverton, Oregon based regional distributor of Volkswagens. Westfalia Campmobiles were selling too quickly for the distributorship to meet demand at the time, so beginning in 1965, Riviera Motors contracted with ASI (Automotive Services, Inc.), based in the Vancouver, Washington area, for Type 2 camper conversions. ASI/Riviera campers were converted to Westfalia-styled Campmobiles from panel and passenger vans during the split windscreen era, with conversions predominantly based on passenger van models after the 1968 introduction of the bay window Type 2. Production continued until sometime in the mid 1980's, with conversions built on the Vanagon (T25) platform after 1979.”

That is ALL that Wiki has on the subject!

3) There just aren’t that many Rivieras. This means that not that many people need parts, which means that no one has found it economically viable to produce replacement parts.

4) ASI has gone out of business. I did find a parts catalog that contained part numbers for all of the parts I need. It was from 1985.

I was able to find the following two very helpful links, but that's about it:
http://www.type2.com/library/camper.htm
http://www.rivieraregistry.com/history.php

All of this makes me very curious and also makes me think that I will be visiting the Beaverton and Vancouver public libraries in the future. Research project!

If you are reading this and would like to correct me on anything regarding this post, PLEASE do! I would love to be wrong about pretty much anything I’ve said above.

Road Trippin' Utah

Craig and I wanted to take a road trip during March. We decided on Yellowstone—after which we discovered that there is only one open entrance to Yellowstone in March and that is on the Montana side. This would have added approximately 17 hours of driving time to our three day trip. In the words of Strong Bad “beleted”.

We decided instead to road trip through Utah. Not my most favorite place in the world—that’s where I went to college. They were not the best four years of my life. All of this aside, the mountains in Utah are absolutely breathtaking, astonishing, enchanting, and other similar adjectives.

Friday night we drove as far as we could without falling asleep at the wheel which turned out to be right near the Great Salt Lake. Considering the number of times we’ve been to Utah, it seemed a bit pathetic that neither Craig nor I had seen the Great Salt Lake. We decided to make our way to Antelope Island (in said lake). The bad news was that Antelope Island closes at dark (I wish I would have known this before driving several miles off of the freeway). Grrr. In the end, we parked Copper in a church parking lot which was near the entrance to Antelope Island. Free lodging—I’ll take it. The next morning, we looked from a great distance at the Great Salt Lake and called it good. We then were followed through town by a really creepy cop who circled around the Wal-Mart parking lot the entire time we were buying chocolate milk. Saturday morning, we met up with Craig’s friend Joe, and spent a great hour and a half or so at Starbucks catching up. Well, Joe and Craig caught up—there wasn’t much catching up for me to do seeing as how it was my first time meeting Joe. (I know how much you appreciate my irrelevant details.)

Craig and I then screwed around for several hours in Salt Lake and Park City. We tried to take Copper to visit her last owner but she wasn’t home, after which we took the back road from Park City to Provo which was gorgeous. The mountains were, as I said before, incredible.
After trying to find a legitimate campground (they were all closed until April) we found some random place to park our bus in Provo Canyon and camped free for the second night in a row. We hiked through the snow up to a lovely waterfall and got some nice R&R in Copper.
Sunday morning was spent showing Craig around BYU campus—he was surprisingly interested in my tour. His presence also minimized the inevitable self esteem drop that happens when I am in Provo. Sunday afternoon we caught up with Chris and his wife—another one of Craig’s friends which was really fun. Those boys have some hilarious stories.

After getting caught in a nasty ice storm, we found lodging in another church parking lot in Brigham City on Sunday night which made our trip entirely lodging free. Hooray! The nice thing about Utah was that we could be really picky about finding a church parking lot. We rejected three in Brigham City (keep in mind, neither of us had ever been in this city before and we had neither maps nor directions, we just wandered aimlessly) before we found a parking lot we found to be adequate. We also found the most gorgeous tabernacle I've ever seen (the pictures don't do any kind of justice).
Monday we headed to Lava Hot Springs, but before actually arriving, we found Maple Grove Hot Springs which was off of highway 30. It was a few miles off of the road and we’d never been there, but it turned out to be pretty nice and we had the place to ourselves. It also afforded us the opportunity to take a hot shower. (Oh sweet cleanliness!) That’s one thing I love about the mountain west--there are hot springs aplenty.
Next up on the road trip docket: Sasquatch Music Festival in May. (Yippee!)

Arrowrock Dam

We went camping over the weekend above Arrowrock Dam.
Arrowrock is probably our favorite—get out of the city NOW before we suffocate—camping sites.
The dam itself is one of my favorite parts of driving up there because it looks so ominous. I don’t know that its ominousness is properly conveyed in the picture, but here it is.

Our camping spot—we were very excited to try out our gorilla-pod (thank you REI dividend).

A nice “Road Less Traveled” photo op.

A really crappy picture of a rabbit.

There is always condensation on the windows when we wake up…it was really cold, so this time there was ice.

Thank you Arrowrock—it was another most excellent adventure.

Oregon Coast

We finally have completed what I would call a successful “road trip” in Penny. We’ve taken here lots of places before, but nowhere more than about 350 miles. Last weekend, we actually made it to the Oregon coast, halfway down the coast, and back. Hooray! This was about 1400 miles (Craig will correct me on the exact mileage later, but he is snoring next to me with a cat on his head and would probably be annoyed if I woke him up to ask for the answer).

We had such a good time that I almost cried when we got home yesterday. We had two reasons for being happy to be home 1) we missed our cat (I mean cats--plural--yeah, we totally missed you too Couch), and 2) you can‘t pump your own gas in Oregon, which we don‘t particularly enjoy.

At the beginning of our trip, we decided to stop at every feasible, Dairy Queen that we passed and get a Dilly Bar because, well, we like doing random things. This proved to be great fun until we saw three Dairy Queens within about an hour. I swear that forth one did not exist. It was a Wendy’s, I’m sure of it.

This trip was awesome because we had NO plans. Well, we had the plan to get to the Oregon coast and we had to be home for work this morning, but other than that, NO plans. We had really good luck with lodging, three nights for $46--not bad, eh? We also learned that with premium gas, a tailwind, and a downhill stretch, Penny will go 80 mph . We also learned that when they say there is dense fog going over Meacham summit, they mean DENSE. We estimated 10 ft visibility…of course, that may have been in part due to our oh so lovely headlights which Craig swears you can’t tell whether they are on or off.

Here's the trip in pictures.

Some beach somewhere. I'm judging by the cleanliness of my hair that it was the beach at Seaside.

Campsite #1

The trip odometer rolling to 1000

Amazing fused glass in the Newport Aquariam

More fused glass. It was breathtaking. (Then again, I do really love fused glass.)

"Welcome to Oddwater--where its okay to be weird" We felt so at home!

Couldn't help myself...

Multanomah

Campsite #2

Craig waking up...and the new curtains.

Some beach somewhere.

Jer Bear bus.

Campsite #3

Sand dollar hunting. Unexpectedly enjoyable.

Modest

Maryn is too modest to say this, but I am quite proud of her, so here we go: The curtains are done! Yeah, I know, huh! They are so cool. Last night we put snaps (not without any snapfoo's (pun)) on the curtains and hung them up. I did one inside out, and Maryn did, too. If you plan to undertake snapping yourself, I would recommend buying the $20 tool rather than using a hammer. Now that we have the snap tool, I already have plans to put snaps on nearly everything Maryn owns. Anyway, the curtains are done and we are headed to the Oregon Coast in less than two hours. We hope to make it to Portland tonight, but maybe early tomorrow, then drive down the coast and back home by Monday night, if we come home at all! Pictures to come!- CCJ

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).

Car #9

Craig and I have been thinking for a while (since it got cold outside) about what it would be like to have a car that had heat. This has been our third winter without a heated car. You get used to being cold and traveling at a max speed of 65 mph, until you drive a car that is warm and goes faster than this. As I mentioned before, we borrowed my mom’s Audi while our cars were out of commission a couple of weeks ago.

The Audi was warm…and we had been looking at Subarus for a while. Last week, we made a casual visit to our local used Subaru dealer. On the way there, Craig asked me—what would have to happen in order for us to buy a car today. I more or less said that it was not possible, but when a clean, inexpensive Legacy, combined with a low pressure salesman came along, I somehow lost my conviction and, well, now we have a heated car that we think will go more than 60 mph (we haven’t tried yet), has two side-view mirrors, auto locks and windows, something which we believe to be called “hill assist”, all-wheel drive, and all of the other standard features that most people who are reading this see nothing special about, but to us are signs of high class luxury. Watch out Paris Hilton, here we come.

We are opposed to owning three cars, so now we have to answer the question: which of our VWs do we sell? I know that selling our VWs makes us invariably less cool, but reduced coolness is the price we are going to pay for warmth. (Plus, I really do like the Subaru.)

We have a few options: 1) sell the bug, 2) sell the vanagon, or 3) sell both and buy a bay window camper.
Option three makes me salivate.
Option three would also probably cost us money.

I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens—in the meantime, anyone want to buy a car?