Geez, my eyes are misty from all the memory filled stories of past bus ownership here....

Mine was a bit different. I found a '72 rust-free camper with the nice Helsinki interior but a sunroof instead of a poptup. It had a blown engine so I got it for $500. I was poor and wanted a used engine put in by my drunken Hungarian mechanic told me he would rebuild it and I could pay him in payments. 5 months went by as I drove past the shop staring at my van that never moved. Eventually I got it in the fall. The sunroof never quite closed right so for all the years it was sitting water had built up in the channels and had turned all kinds of nasty colors. This was unknown to me at the time. When I finally got it from my mechanic I brought it home and decided to take my new bride on a little ride. The first time I hit the brakes 10 years worth of "sewagey" water poured all over my wife. Luckily this was a cold fall day to add to the misery. That was probably the first time I got "The Look". Even though the bus had new heater boxes, etc. the interior was heated by exhaust whenever the heat was turned on so this van had no heat right off the bat. Not a good thing in SE PA. Our first camping trip ever was at a private campground (we did not know better) and luckily it was Square Dance Weekend. Yup, loud square-dance music poured from the clubhouse for hours on end. The wife soon perfected "The Look". I spent the next few years replacing starters in campgrounds, tires in the snow, clutch cables in the mud, etc. It had a monthly trip to the shop to get the carburetor adjusted as it NEVER ran right. Eventually coming home from work one day on route 476 I heard the inevitable tappa-tappa-tappa-tappa-whap-whap-whap from the #3 valve. I sold it to a guy named Zeke at YBH VW for $500. He still works there but they won't answer my emails. I'm curios at to what became of it. The '84 GL I bought to replace it in '93 was a disaster of unimaginable proportions. How my wife let me buy my current '83.5 in '96 I'll never know but it has made up for all the bad things that happened in our previous vans. I still have that one and now an '03 Eurovan MV which I just added 2 weeks ago. Ahhhh, automatic, air conditioning.....

Bryan