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Date:         Thu, 22 Jun 1995 19:47:06 -0500 (EST)
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Jim Kirk <captain@indy.net>
Subject:      Trip Addendum

We planned for this trip for quite a while, maybe a week or two! It was a last minute decision to make the trip to Charleston SC to visit our daughter, Jessica, who, along with her boyfriend Hans, is working on the next Ace Ventura movie. The decision to drive Blushie, my 1971 VW bus, was two fold. First, she was running better than my Dodge Caravan second there was a VW meet in Elizabethtown Kentucky we could hit on the way home. (Plus, I guessed there would be a story in there somewhere!) I spent a couple nights getting the old girl ready for the trip. I changed the oil, plugs, and points and condenser. The valves were adjusted, and she was cleaned up from about 3 different camping trips. Before we left, I had taken the opportunity of getting on the Internet and asking for advice from several of the groups I frequent. I was on the homebrew group asking for the best places to find good beer along our planned route. None of the Budmillercoors swill for me! Then I asked on the Blues group for the best Blues clubs, and of course I got on the Vanagon group and asked for the best places to get a 1971 bus fixed along the way. This is a GREAT resource!! I got many responses. With this information firmly in hand, we headed off on a great adventure. The thing that was going to make this trip interesting, I thought, was the fact that on the way out of town, we stopped at some friends house and picked up our two new kitties that were about 7 weeks old at the time. We took them away from their mother and the only people they had ever known and threw them into a shaking, vibrating metal box and kept them there for 8 to 10 hours at a time. The first day, Kate, my wife, had a kitty necklace. They were scared. Who wouldn't be scared? I was scared! We drove to Marietta Ohio, stopped to eat dinner and see about getting a motel for the evening. It never occurred to me to make reservations. It never occurred to me that it was Memorial Day weekend and there would be lots of travelers out there. Lots of travelers looking for motels at the same time I was. There were no motels to be had in Marietta. We called Parkersburg, West Virginia, just across the Ohio River. We called all the major chain hotels, Red Roof, Best Western, Holiday Inn, etc. No way! So we started calling the lesser known motels such as Johnny's Motel. We finally found a motel for the evening. It was clean and we were tired. Another thing occurred to us at this time. During the ride to Parkersburg, our two kitties had slept most of the way. Now when we were tired and ready to pass out, the kitties had other ideas. They romped and jumped and played all night. At least that's what Kate told me. I passed out and it would have taken a Mack truck to wake me. When I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and found the cats locked in there, I figured something was up! The next day, we were on the road again. By this time the cats had decided the bus was Ok and they were ready to start exploring. (We thought of all kinds of names for them. Things like Bartles & James, and Sears & Roebuck. After watching them for a couple of days we decided upon Twist and Shout. They live up to the names!) This day we drove to Charlotte, North Carolina. Blushie was running fine. The prep work paid off. The only problem had been a slight drifting of the timing but, it took only about 5 minutes to fix it before we left. When we got to Charlotte, something else occurred to us. I'm from Indianapolis. What do I know about NASCAR races? I only know of one race over Memorial Day, and I had tried to leave that mess behind in Indy. It turns out there's is a big race in Charlotte over the same weekend. Guess what?? No motels! When we stopped to get gas, we were told the race would be over in about an hour, so we gassed up and headed south as fast as Blushie would go! (Which, by the way is exactly 68 mph!) At this point it was only about 3 or 4 hours to Columbia, South Carolina, so we used our brand new cellular phone, bought just for this trip, to make motel reservations in Columbia. We were in luck! Again, the cats slept all day and stayed up all night, in the bathroom. Again, I slept through the whole thing. Kate was amazed that they didn't bother me, but then again, I did all the driving. So far, we hadn't had time to look for the blues bars and brewpubs we had learned about over the Internet. Luckily, we hadn't needed to locate any of the VW repair places either! Now were only about 3 hours away from our destination, Charleston. It was an easy drive to Jessica's place. When we drove up in front of her apartment, we thought it would be funny to call her on the cell phone and tell her to look out her front door. As we were making the call, she came out telling us that her boyfriend, Hans, recognized the sound of a VW engine and knew it had to be us. While using Charleston for a home base, we took the drive to Beaufort. This is the place that is loaded with very old homes. It's where they filmed Prince of Tides and The Big Chill. We found a restaurant that had the hottest hotwings I have seen this side of the Mississippi River. While in Charleston, one of our missions was to visit musical instrument stores looking for an acoustic guitar for Kate. We happened into Town & Country Music. I immediately recognized the owner as the man that taught mandolin classes at Blues Camp last year where we got married. He didn't have any guitars for Kate, but he did have an old interesting looking Romanian mandolin that we snagged for a good price. He stepped out to take a look at Blushie who was sitting in his front yard (parking lot). He told me of his '80 Vanagon that had no engine. He'd been looking for an engine for 4 years! He said he wanted to get rid of it, so I asked him that fateful question..."What do you want for it?" He told me I could have it if I gave it a good home. So now the problem is to get back to St. James Island, South Carolina and pick up my "free" Vanagon. That'll be the next chapter in this story. We went to a blues bar in Charleston. Well, at least we thought it was a blues bar. The name of the place was Blues. There was a blue neon sign in the window proudly announcing the name. When we walked in, we quickly determined it wasn't a blues bar. There was a very large painted mural on the wall of Jimmy Buffett. They were serving Cheeseburgers in Paradise. This could be my kind of place. I'm a devout Parrothead (Jimmy Buffett follower)! I settled in with a cheeseburger and then the music started to play. It was disco! Everyone know's disco sucks! So we ate quickly and left. We did find a brewpub in Mt. Pleasant (suburb of Charleston). T-Bonz is a good place with good food and fairly good beer. They were new and only had made about 3 batches of beer thus far, so I thought they were doing very well indeed. They told me this was a pilot brewpub. If it did well, they had backing to expand all over North and South Carolina. I hope they do! If the crowd is any indication, they should do fine. We spent about 4 days in Charleston visiting with Jessica and Hans. They were production people on the movie and worked 12 to 15 hour days, leaving us lots of time to sightsee. I was ready to get underway due to some information I had received from the Internet. We needed to stop again in Columbia to visit Maurice's Piggy Park, the home of some of the finest mustard based BBQ this side of heaven! We had a big dinner, and drove to Asheville. By the time we got to Asheville and found the motel (gotta love that car phone!) our choices were very limited for dinner reservations. We ended up going to the little Waffle House by the motel for some of the greasiest food you would ever want to try. The next morning we headed up the Blueridge Parkway to visit something else I learned about on the Internet. Busses by the Blueridge was going on this weekend. We had tried to go up the mountain the night before, but it was getting dark, foggy and my wife was very nervous, so we tried again after a night's sleep and some sunlight. It was third gear all the way except for the part that was second gear! This time we made it and visited some friends we had made over the cyberspace link. Ray and Lea Hale from Gainsville, Florida were there. It was good to be able to put a face to the letters that appear on the screen. Nice folks. Turns out, they knew some friends of ours. It really is a small world! We weren't able to stay long, many miles to go before we had to be back at work on Monday. We stayed a couple hours and spoke with several bus owners and vowed to come back next year and stay the whole weekend. Now we were off through the mountains (downhill all the way!) to Knoxville, Tennessee, where we found the Smokey Mountain Brewing Company. Good eats, good beer. I liked the Pale, Kate preferred the Amber. Great onion rings!! We drove on through the day to Nashville, Tennessee. Had dinner at Hooters. Good food again, great hooters! Had to keep checking the timing, but it didn't take much to keep it running right. Blushie was running fine and seemed to like driving through the mountains. From Nashville it was about 5 hours to Elizabethtown, Kentucky where we met up with Pete and Ed from the Southern Indiana Volks Force club and people from several other VW clubs in Tennessee and Kentucky. It was a nice park. Lots of nice people. Twist and Shout made friends with lots of ladies. It seems that kitties are chick magnets. Too bad I learn this after I got married! (Just kidding Kate!) We spent a few hours there talking to people, hitting the swap tables and generally having a good time. Again, we had miles to go before we slept and were getting closer to home. A home Twist and Shout had never seen. We stopped in Louisville Kentucky and called Robin Garr, a guy I had talked to many times before. He is one of the system operators of the homebrew forum on CompuServe. He's given me much advice over the years as I was learning how to homebrew. Now I was going to possibly get to meet him in person and hoist a brew or two. I called him from the Bluegrass Brewpub. He came right over with his wife and their two friends, Martha & Deb (Wierd Sisters Brewing, Louisville, KY) to share a brew with us. We talked at great lengths about what? Beer! We brought them out to visit with Twist and Shout. Can you believe it, they wouldn't let our kitties in the bar. I guess you have to be over 21 in Kentucky to go into a bar. After saying our goodbyes, we headed north into Indiana, stopping in southern Indiana at a WalMart to buy kitty supplies and finally made it into our driveway around 10:45 P.M. It had been a long trip, but Kate, Twist, Shout, Blushie and myself made it with no problems and we all had a real good time! I would like to thank all the folks who gave us advice and encouragement to make it through the trip. We couldn't have done it without you! Hope to make the trip again someday. If you are ever travelling through the Indianapolis area and want to know where the Blues Bars, Beer Bars or VW repair shops are, let us know! We'll point you in the right direction and probably even join you! The next installment will be about the impending trip back to Charleston to tow back a 1980 Vanagon with no motor. There's gotta be a story in there somewhere. <Jim Kirk>


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