To make sense of my love for VW vans we have to go all the way back to my first interesting experience with any VW which was an oval window green convertable that a friend of my father's owned and he let me steer it and even push on the little round wheel that was attached to the foot throttle. I was 8 years old and was fascinated with this little car that looked like a giant beetle at the time. They were so small but so well designed that a man 6 foot 6 inches tall had plenty of head and foot room in them. So it was better to be tall than wide if you wanted to be comfortable in a Bug.
Later in 1966 I purchased for college a 1965 vw bug. Then again in 1969 I bought another one that I wound up driving over 130,000 miles in 5 years.(I drove a lot then to be with girlfriends and to climb mountains and rock climb with my buddies in places like Yosemite Valley). I could afford it then because gas was only between 17 cents and 33 cents a gallon then. It didn't go to 50 to 80 cents a gallon until the Arab Oil embargo in 1973.
When I bought my first bug for college my Dad also bought for himself a Westfalia VW 1964 Camper. He then bought a roof rack so we could sleep on a foam pad on the roof at night in the desert whenever it was warm enough. The only problem was that Dad snored and with wooden cupboards inside it amplified the sound like being inside an acoustic guitar when we slept inside way out in the middle of nowhere.
In the 1970s after my son was born I bought a VW window van and painted it green and white. When I married my second wife she had a 1971 VW Westfalia van that she called FIG because that was part of the license. It was red and white then.
We sold it to help buy material to build our house 10 miles from the nearest small town out in the forests of Mt. Shasta, an A-Frame on 2 1/2 acres of land.
Recently my 20 year old daughter and her boyfriend showed up in a 1970 Westfalia VW van. I stared thinking that this thing is 40 years old now, a real antique. But they seem very happy with it and it still gets 20 miles per gallon even though it is now bored out to 1900 cc. However, it is still pretty slow going uphill so they prefer to not drive it on freeways and usually take the scenic drives through mountains and deserts instead because it is safer because a slower vehicle than most now.
What is still wonderful about them is that you can still work on them yourself which seems to give my daughter's boyfriend endless pleasure to keep it up and maintain it himself.
Though I parted with my last VW van in the early 1980s I still miss the vans and especially my 1966 vw seablue bug that I sold to go to Hawaii in 1974 along with my Grand piano that was a high school graduation gift. However, I must say here that I moved so much back then(from 21 to 30) that I had already moved the grand piano up to the second floor of several apartments throughout California by then and so to sell it saved my back from placing the piano on a 3 inch piece of padded wood and pushing it up 2 floors over and over again.
My present wife bought me a grand piano for my birthday about 10 years ago now so I now have another baby Grand piano that I and everyone else who likes to play uses.
Anyway, I realy enjoyed bugs and still find that in general that they are still the most comfortable car for me to drive cross country in even though I haven't had one in years. And still, a Westfalia VW van Camper is one of the best designed campers I have ever seen in its size anywhere on earth. It's only problem now(The 1970s and earlier) is that they are kind of dangerous because they are so slow on a freeway and uphill and because of that be sort of a hazard to themselves and other drivers in some situations now. But for the real enthusiast, getting off the freeway and driving the back roads at slower speeds brings out the real beauty of a VW van camper.
By the way I found out that Brazil still makes new Engines for these early VW bugs and campers and window vans and that there are companies here in the U.S. that assemble these parts here as well or you can order an engine direct from Brazil.
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