Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 11:00:54 -0800
Reply-To: Tom Young <young@SHERLOCK.SIMS.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Tom Young <young@SHERLOCK.SIMS.BERKELEY.EDU>
Subject: Re: Any experience with California Campers?
In-Reply-To: <002001bf23e9$302e0e20$6464a8c0@586mit64mb>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
No one has ever asked this question before, so I've never related my
disappointing experience with California Campers.
About a year ago we decided to rent a Westfalia from CC to use on a
visit to our daughter on Vancouver Island, Canada. So, after communicating
a couple of times via email with Sorin (the proprietor) my wife
and I drove to San Francisco on a Friday afternoon to pick up the van. We
met Sorin, got a quick rundown on how the camping equipment worked, and my
wife jumped back into our car to return to work in the East Bay. I hung
around to finish up the paperwork, planning to follow her home shortly.
After finishing the paperwork I bade Sorin farewell and jumped into the van
and drove down the hill from Sorin's apartment. There's a stop sign at the
bottom of his hill so I stepped on the brakes.... and drifted through
the intersection when the brake pedal traveled almost completely to the
floor!
By pumping the brake pedal I got the van stopped, then turned around and
drove back up the hill. When I explained to Sorin what just happened
at the bottom of his hill it appeared that he didn't see any problem;
his response (I'm not making this up) was that "the brakes on that van
hold a little low."!!!! I jumped back in the parked van, stepped on the
brakes and showed him that the pedal almost hit the floor before
stopping; sure, you could pump them up, but I'd be damned if I was going
to drive all the way to Vancouver that way, with my family in the car.
After a bit of discussion, Sorin agreed that I could take a different
vehicle.
Sorin didn't have another van ready at the momement so I hung out while
he prepares another Westy. While he's doing this I look at the tires
on the rear of the 2nd van. They're getting a bit thin - still legal,
but not the kind of tires I'd use on a van I was renting to someone for a
1,500 mile road trip. I point this out to Sorin, and he tells me he was
planning on replacing them after the next rental. After a bit more
discussion on the matter - I'd like to swap wheels with the Westie with
the bad brakes - he says we can go down to his tire supplier and get
new tires, but it would probably take a couple of hours. Since it's now
getting late in the day and we are planning on leaving early in the
morning, I decide I'll risk it with the tires on the van and start the
drive home.
On the drive through the city streets of San Francisco, getting to the
freeway, I'm noticing a slight "klunk" that seems to be coming from
somewhere down by the front tires, and a slight judder in the steering
wheel, but I attribute that to San Francisco's bad streets. The car
smooths out nicely on the drive home on the freeway, and I park the van in
our driveway. After a 3 or 4 hours of stowing and packing, we're ready to
make our getaway at the dawn's early light.
Bright and early the next morning we all hop into the van and I begin the
short drive over to my mother's house to pick her up; we plan to drop
her off in Seattle to visit some friends while we go on into Canada.
At that time the streets around my mother's house had just been
freshly paved and were smooth and nice like only new pavement can be.
Driving on these smoothly surfaced roads made it real clear that
what I'd been hearing and feeling the day before was not the
judder and shake from driving pot-holed streets. Rather, I'd been feeling
the judder and shake of a bad right front wheel bearing in the van!
Calling Sorin from my mother's house I told him that I needed yet
another van because of the bad wheel bearing on van number 2 and asked
that he bring one out to me in Walnut Creek, posthaste.
Now, as it was a weekend morning, (Saturday), it should take only about 25
minutes to drive from San Francisco to Walnut Creek. Figure another 20
or 30 minutes to get your pants on, squirt off another van, etc. and I
figured Sorin would be showing up right around 8:30 AM, since I'd called
him shortly before 7:30 AM. At around 10:15 Sorin shows up in van #3; it
had taken him that long because the wife and baby and all their gear
were in the car with him, all set to swap vans and take a little trip
down to Monterey!
Another hour or so changing paperwork, swapping the loads in the two
vans, etc. and off we go, getting away over 3 hours later than we
planned, I can't really blame Sorin for us getting stuck at the
California/Oregon border that night due to snow on the pass, but they did
shut it down about 15 minutes before we came through.
The next day, driving into a rest stop just south of Portland, I hear
some car that's clearly got a bad muffler; it's making that "rumph,
rumph" noise that sounds like you've driving a souped-up piece of American
iron with a hot cam. It wasn't until I pulled into a parking space that
it became clear that the car with the making the noise was us! Crawling
under the car (in the rain - hey, it's Oregon) I see that all the bolts
and the related gasket that attach one of the left-side exhaust
manifolds to the collector have disappeared somewhere between the Oregon
border and our rest stop.
If you've ever driven in Oregon you'll have noticed that they have that
funny law against pumping your own gas. It seems that they must have
another law against repair shops staying open late on a rainy Sunday
afternoon, because we drove around for over an hour in Portland trying to
find anyone that could help us. We finally found an open "76" station with
a "mechanic" on duty. 'Course, he didn't have the gasket we needed,
though he figured he could cut the material he needed from some other
gaskets he had on hand. The other problem was that he didn't have any
bolts in the shop to replace the missing ones!
Off I go, running through the rain, to the nearest Home Depot to find my
"mechanic" some bolts. When I get back he bolts everything together, I
fire up the car, and once more I'm driving a something that sounds
like a Vanagon, not a hot V8-engined F*rd. I pay the man and off we go,
heading toward Seattle.
Slowing down in the Seattle suburbs, looking for the house where we're
going to drop my mom, it's obvious that the "fix" in Portland didn't last
the day because once more we're hearing the "rumph, rumph, rumph" of
exhaust where the gasket has blown out from between the flanges. Since
it's clear we can't get across the Canadian border sounding like that we
spend another couple of fruitless hours trying to find a chain-store
FLAPS that might have the gasket we need. No luck.
Giving up, we drove up to Bellingham, Washington, the last town south of
the border that has a VW dealership. We planned to get to the dealership
first thing Monday morning, get the car fixed, then hot-foot it up to
the border and catch the first ferry of the day to Vancouver Island.
It was important that we catch the FIRST ferry of the day because our
daughter's school had planned a 2-day ecology field study and if we
missed the first ferry we couldn't see her until the group came back to
campus, which was the last day of our trip. Of course, we had REALLY
planned to be across the border Sunday night, but our problems with the
California Campers vans had spoiled those plans.
The next moring I'm at the dealership before they open, which doesn't
really do me any good because the parts department doesn't open until
an hour after the repair shop opens. However, eventually the van gets
fixed, we pay the man (yet again) and off we go to the border. We get
across and finally get to the ferry just as the first ferry of the
morning is pushing away from the dock, with the next scheduled ferry
set to go 2 hours later. So, no, we didn't get to see our daughter
that day.
For the next couple of days we bummed around Vancouver Island (a very
pretty place) but a huge windstorm prevented us from even trying out
camping in the Westy, which was point of renting the vehicle in the
first place. We finally get to see our daughter our last day on the
island, and then head back toward Seattle to pick up my mom for the
trip home.
At some point in southern Washington I let my wife take over driving
and I go sit in the back seat to get some rest. Lightly dozing, it
slowly comes to me that the engine tone has changed; it's lower and
throaty, clearly not another exhaust leak, but somehow changed from
it's normal tone. Struggling to come awake I notice that a Winnabeggo
camper is passing us on the left as the van labors up a small rise on the
freeway. I have my wife pull over on the side of the freeway and I take
over driving, trying to find a spot where I can park the car and possibly
figure out what's happening here. Naturally, it's blacker than the
inside of a cow, it's raining, and there isn't the light of a rest stop
or gas station for as far as the eye can see.
Laboring on, we finally find a gas station and I pull in and turn off the
car. Emptying everything out of the back, I pull up the engine cover
and start looking for frayed wires, loose hoses, anything that might
explain why we've got no power. I detach and re-attach everything I
can find, but don't see anything wrong. I slide under the car and
look for anything gone awry down there with the same results -
everything looks fine.
I load everything back into the car, crank the engine over and - it's
running fine! "Ah ha," I exclaim. "It's one of those 'wet westy' ECU
thingies that I've read about on the list where turning the ignition
off and on resets something and the car runs fine after that!" Since
it was now getting close to midnight, we found a motel and called it a
night.
The next morning, 20 or so minutes down the road, the problem we'd
experienced the night before resurfaced, and this time turning off the
ignition and restarting the car didn't help a thing. Once more I do
the chinese firedrill of pulling everything out of the back, tugging
and pulling on wire and hoses, sliding under the car yet again, but I
can't find a thing that explains our problem.
Oregon has some long lonely stretches of road, and we were in the
middle of one of those. So we soldier on, with the car running slower and
slower, the exhaust note getting lower and lower, as we stuggle up and
down the hills of southern Oregon. At some point it dawns on me that
what we're probably experiencing is a clogged catalytic converter - that
would explain the loss of power and the exhaust tone - but there's not a
damn thing I can do about it out in the middle of nowhere, so on we go,
driving on the shoulder of the road at less than 10 miles per hour.
At some point the van simply dies altogether. Luckily we're able to
drift off the freeway, down a nearby offramp, maybe a mile or so from
the nearest phone. I make the hike, call AAA, and walk back to the car.
This story has gone on way too long already so I'll just say that after
I used my AAA card to have the van towed the 40 or so miles to a city
that had a VW dealership, I rented a compact car (at $75 per day), we
crammed 4 people and all our gear into it, and drove home.
I guess I can't really blame the speeding ticket I got from the
California Highway Patrol at 1:00 AM just south of the border on
California Campers either, but it did make a nice end to a wonderful trip.
No, I won't be renting a Westie from California Campers anytime soon.
On Sun, 31 Oct 1999, Roland Niebisch wrote:
> at California Campers (San Francisco and LA) you can (only) rent =
> Westfalia Vanagon Campers. Perhaps we'll come over from Germany next =
> year and spend our holidays in and with one of their cars. Does anybody =
> has experiences ?
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Tom Young young@sherlock.SIMS.Berkeley.EDU
Lafayette, CA 94549 '81 Vanagon
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