Ch.1- The Beginning-Part3
When Lee spoke of
the coming of the Sequoia trip and his ideas for how he planned on
going were just beginning to come out as we had a discussion one night a few
months before they finally had left for their trip. Ann was historically quiet
and had very little negative to say as Lee laid out the master plan for the
trip. first he was going to buy an old V.W. van , Do whatever conversion he had
to do , and then go over every little thing that could go wrong with and
prepare a backup plan .He was interested in V.W.vans as you can buy this manual
Lee once had, that told you how to repair a V.W. engine on the road,
including a backup engine you could bring along with a box of tools and
essentially rebuild the engine or tranny sitting alongside the road. if you
need an air compressor , pop a plug out and insert an airline fitting
in the sparkplug hole and start your engine up. it would inflate your
tires if you need to, it was definitely a get you there and get you back van
as well as fuel efficient. I used to have one that gave me 25 miles to
the gallon. But that wasn't the camper special.
The camper special I used to
have had a refrigerator ice box that worked off propane. a pop up top camper ,
and a nice little table for two. Impromptu roadside picnics were commonplace
with my camper. I knew personally about the air compressor thing as
i had a spark plug blow out of the head as i was driving down the
road. it made a god awful racket running on 3 cylinders but still made it to
the parts store to pick up a heli coil kit. And now that i mentioned heli coil
i will have to let you the reader be responsible for figuring that out or i
will never ever get done with this story. But since you were wondering it is a
thread insert kit for a cylinder head. it allowed a person to thread the
spark plug back in, a necessary evil at the least, and very much like hiring a
lawyer.
Maybe it was me attesting to
the V.W. campers reliability as a proven vehicle that intrigued Ann about the
whole thing. To drive a couple of thousands of miles not worrying about anything,
including how much gasoline cost. These old vans seemed to go on forever when
they were running great. Ann then did
finally put in her two cents worth
, getting Lee to agree to let her pay her share, and since they were
saving money on the van then staying at
a motel nightly should not be such a big deal. That way she wouldn't have to
share a bathroom.
She would rather take her chances in a
seedy motel with beg bugs biting you and a cold shower and dirty toilet, than
wake up in the middle of a forest with a grizzly rocking the camper and acting
real pissed about something and nearly scaring the shit out of her, worse yet ,
to have nowhere to go. At least the bath room was hers for the
night.
So now lee was on a mission to find that V.W.
van, and since they were not making them anymore , it may prove to be a harder
fix than he thought.
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