Mostly sunny and 75º @ 10:30 AM. Clothes Washed: Jo washed a load of clothes and hung them out on the clothesline to dry. Rusty and Bucket helped. The dogs consider hanging out the clothes with Jo one of their jobs and get very upset if she forgets to let them help. The clothesline is only about 30 feet from the house and in an area the dogs visit several times every day, but for some reason this chore is special for them. Time to get off the computer and move on to other things. 87º @ 1 PM1:00 PM - Comment
Back from an uneventful hike up to the gate and back. Partly cloudy and 86º.
Tumblr: End of an Era: The Old Hippie Bus Finds A New Home
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Back from an uneventful hike up to the gate and back. Partly cloudy and 86º.Tumblr: End of an Era: The Old Hippie Bus Finds A New Home
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The old hippie bus has a new home. Maybe it will be restored (doubtful). Maybe it will be scavenged for parts (possible). Maybe it will continue its life as a yard ornament, parked and deteriorating in someone’s yard as it has done here for the past twenty years (probable).
There was a time when the 1964 VW transporter was used for daily transportation. I drove it to work. We took it on a vacation. We made a couple of trip from Houston to Arkansas. The VW was even more dependable in Arkansas where I could almost always find a slope to park it on. Having the option of a rolling, clutch-popping start was always a good idea. Its old 6-volt electrical system often refused to crank the starter.
We stopped driving the bus when it lost fourth gear. First, it started popping out of gear every once and a while. The frequency of pop-outs increased over time and finally keeping it in forth proved impossible. I made one last trip to town using third as the VW’s top gear when our other vehicle broke down and I needed a replacement part. Despite good intentions of replacing the transaxle with a junkyard unit and getting the VW back on the road again, it never left the yard again — until today.
The same fellow who bought the VW — the UPS driver for this area — also bought my old 1966 GMC pickup. We drove the pickup for several years and even used it for doing a few of our early shows. The GMC wasn’t a good show vehicle, though. It’s cargo space wasn’t large enough and we couldn’t cover the bed well enough to keep the boxes of pottery dry. We replaced the GMC with a van for doing art fairs and retired it from highway use completely when the front end came to need major (i. e. expensive) repairs. We intended to keep the Jimmy running and use it for trips to the mailbox, harvesting firewood and other jobs on and around our place. This we did for a couple of years, but eventually the hassle of keeping a third vehicle running led to the GMC becoming a yard ornament too.
So two of our three non-running vehicles are gone. (We still have a 1968 MGB for which we need to find a buyer.) For daily transportation we depend upon our late model 1983 Nissan pickup and a 3/4-ton Econoline van of the same vintage.
There was a time when the 1964 VW transporter was used for daily transportation. I drove it to work. We took it on a vacation. We made a couple of trip from Houston to Arkansas. The VW was even more dependable in Arkansas where I could almost always find a slope to park it on. Having the option of a rolling, clutch-popping start was always a good idea. Its old 6-volt electrical system often refused to crank the starter.
We stopped driving the bus when it lost fourth gear. First, it started popping out of gear every once and a while. The frequency of pop-outs increased over time and finally keeping it in forth proved impossible. I made one last trip to town using third as the VW’s top gear when our other vehicle broke down and I needed a replacement part. Despite good intentions of replacing the transaxle with a junkyard unit and getting the VW back on the road again, it never left the yard again — until today.
The same fellow who bought the VW — the UPS driver for this area — also bought my old 1966 GMC pickup. We drove the pickup for several years and even used it for doing a few of our early shows. The GMC wasn’t a good show vehicle, though. It’s cargo space wasn’t large enough and we couldn’t cover the bed well enough to keep the boxes of pottery dry. We replaced the GMC with a van for doing art fairs and retired it from highway use completely when the front end came to need major (i. e. expensive) repairs. We intended to keep the Jimmy running and use it for trips to the mailbox, harvesting firewood and other jobs on and around our place. This we did for a couple of years, but eventually the hassle of keeping a third vehicle running led to the GMC becoming a yard ornament too.
So two of our three non-running vehicles are gone. (We still have a 1968 MGB for which we need to find a buyer.) For daily transportation we depend upon our late model 1983 Nissan pickup and a 3/4-ton Econoline van of the same vintage.
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