Back to Antibes for a VW get-together
Trip Start
Mar 28, 2003
1
23
27
Trip End
Ongoing
Antibes, France
Sunday, March 21, 2004
The morning after we arrived, we heard the now familiar putt-putt-ing of a much quieter VW than ours. Our new neighbours were a young English couple in a classic ?E5 van. The next day and another VW van, a mint condition ?E3 this time, pulled in to complete the hat trick. An Aussie couple finished off the row in a tent. At night we compared van stories: "Yep, we sleep that way too now after my girlfriend kept waking up with her hair frozen to the inside door". "Nope, our heater doesn't work either". "Ice on the inside of the van? Yeah lots". It was reassuring to hear that ours was not the only VW with these design features.
We also compared van names - something that we learnt is as essential to VW ownership as topping up its oil. Ours was christened Barney in aide of Barney Banana ice creams back home that apparently shared the same yellow and cream colour scheme. Matt and Anne had named theirs Jenny. To stress the importance of van-naming, Matt recounted that when VW-hunting he had emailed about one van without correctly referring to the van by its name. He received a terse reply saying he obviously wasn't the right kind of person for Bob (or whatever the van's name was). This type of reply wasn't a one-off either?Esome VW folks are a little strange?E
As it happened, Matt was a former mechanic and kindly spent a few minutes with his head in our engine bay. Without going into details, let me just say it is a tribute to German engineering as to how many pieces can be wrong or missing on a VW engine without it stopping. After four days which all ended in me being covered in grease and engine oil, we set off towards Italy with the van now running worse than ever. I honestly don't know why I bother...
