Itinerant Air-Cooled

No wrenches were turned, but Colin made a stop in Cleveland at the home of Sean G on his way from New York to Detroit. We pored over the beauty and originality of the Bob D. In addition, I salivated over the buttery smoothness of its sliding door operation.

I even got to drive it! Er, 20 feet in reverse, and another 20 feet forward!

That maneuver was to get my Westy out of the driveway so we could drive to a local Mexican restaurant. There Colin showed us his command of the Spanish language by ordering a blanco rusky, or some such thing, to drink and engaging in small talk with the staff.

He drove my Bus there and back, and gave it a quick diagnosis, well sort of. I asked him if my lifters were too noisy for hydraulics, and he answered with a question, as he usually does, "Are you sure it's the lifters?" He listened a bit more and proclaimed my engine to be something along the lines of a "caucaphony of reciprocating mass".

I'm taking that as a compliment!

Good conversation (but far too short), good company, good food and drink, and good VWs. What could be better?

Onward, Colin and safe travels!

At Sean's home... Sean's '59 Westy, my '78, and the Bob D.


You have to see it to believe it....


Is there any hope that my slider would ever again be as smooth as the Bob D's?

vwlover77 wrote:You have to see it to believe it....

That's right. The result of the local town birdbath/community fountain wash job with the outraged proprietress of the local nail salon asking me what I was doing . . . "Well I AM washing the birdshit off of my car, and YOU?"

That was a good dinner with a sprinkling of Constitutional Law Query vs Correct Endplay and a motion to dismiss that beautiful case denied without prejudice. You don't deny a 36hp case another chance.

I got cornered by a local citizen down the 90 a ways. He followed me closely even when I tried to shake him off at the JoAnn fabric store parking lot. He blocked me in to tell me that he used to own one of those "vans".
ColinInMichiganWhereTheFordsDriveFast

Amskeptic wrote:ColinInMichiganWhereTheFordsDriveFast

Well, that answers that question!

Not all Fords drive fast in Michigan ... have a '68 F-100 that's geared pretty low... don't normally drive it over 70mph on the highway.

I call it my redneck pick'em up truck .... complete with a jacked up rear end, a gun rack in the back, NRA stickers and harley davidson stickers. None of which I did myself (except the Harley sticker... I ride one, and it didn't seem like a complete red neck pickup without one). I think if Colin would have turned tail and ran if he saw that in my drive way the first time he came to visit.

TrollFromDownBelow wrote:
I call it my redneck pick'em up truck .... complete with a jacked up rear end, a gun rack in the back, NRA stickers and harley davidson stickers. None of which I did myself (except the Harley sticker... I ride one, and it didn't seem like a complete red neck pickup without one). I think if Colin would have turned tail and ran if he saw that in my drive way the first time he came to visit.

You kidding? I have driven on Pennsylvania red clay roads a rusty '65 Ford pick-up with a driver's door that dropped an inch every time you opened it, a '73 Dodge pick-up (mild lift) with the Slant Six and a tailgate that required a drop kick with a cinder block to open it, and that '67 Chevy pick-up with the 235 cid straight 6 that locked up the column shift in reverse and 2nd where you had to bang the linkages under the truck back into neutral, git back inner truck spitcher chaw and the only sticker is that the blinker's bin on since the main road, where's the dawg, oh thereeis.
(see, there's real pick-up trucks, and there's poseur pick-up trucks)

vwlover77 wrote:Colin made a stop in Cleveland

I was too late at picture-taking time, so these are watery looking, but it was cool to see the familial resemblance between the 1959 and the 1978 buses, with the radii of the side profile almost identical from 1950 through 1979.