Sunday, August 13

One of the traditions that Jeff and I have is working on our vehicles. Jeff has/had (it's a long story) a VW westy, as do we. Our holidays have often been spent greasy and crawling under the orange busses. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes it was stressful, but either way it seems to be a tradition.

Jeff and I and our respective wives got married 6 days apart, on a hot August 5 years ago. Jeff and Marcie flew down to Mexico for a week, and we headed south towards Oregon. When they got back from Mexico, they headed south and met us at a campground that I had visited since my childhood, called Beverley Beach, in Oregon. In our vans, we wound our way back up towards canada. After a brief stop to let the dog pee, I got back in and found that the shifter moved about a foot in either direction, and would not go into first. Naturally, it started to rain just then, and I noticed we were parked right on a small lake. No crawling under there. Jeff and Marcie pushed onto the road, where I could get into 3rd and 4th gears. From there we limped it the last half-hour to our campsite. The only hairy part was a 90 degree turn across traffic onto a steep highway on-ramp...there I had to use the old 'rev-pop-drop' technique with the clutch just to keep it going. Momentum is everything. When we got to the campground Jeff and I crawled under the van and found a long bolt missing from the shift linkage. Between us we had enough crap in our toolboxes to have just the right bolt for the job. That bolt is still in there.

Another time was when we were planning on going out to Tofino with them for four days. When we arrived, Jeff was just finishing putting a new engine in his bus. I helped him put the finishing touches on, and then minutes later someting wen't afoul with ours. I couldn't locate the problem, so on a monday, we pulled the engine, stripped it down and discovered a cracked head, went bought heads, put the engine back together, and fired her up. It took 12 hours total. Off we went with a couple of less than impressed wives. Sorry ladies.

We couldn't break tradition, so this time I brought some of my birthday goodies out so that Jeff and I could turn a wrench together without risking getting stuck somewhere. We put the new front tire on the scoot (carrot, crumpet, coronette), and at the same time installed the new speedo cable so we could tell how far and how fast we were going. It all went very smoothly and it turns out the speedo can hit 50mph with new tires on. Not that we went that fast :)