Vee-Dub Love
I got to drive a stick-shift today, a neighborly neighbor's truck which I had filled with mulch and then shovelled out under some of my gazillion trees. I've really missed it! This automatic transmission stuff is for the birds, seriously. It makes me sleepy when I drive.
I grew up in Volkswagen vans, a white one certainly, with a backwards-facing seat behind the driver that definitely belonged to my oldest brother. There might have been a red one, and possibly a blue one? I can smell them still, although obviously I can't see them!
(See the three VW vans in the parking lot far away in this photo of the four of us plus 3 cousins? One of those is ours....)
My uncle went for VWs as well, but the Bugs rather than the vans. Deep, low back seats that inevitably made me carsick (dark blue for sure)...eventually he sold one to my sister, who sold it to my younger brother, who spray-painted it in a camouflage print.
I learned how to drive stick shift in one of our vans, in the high school parking lot. Mark tried to teach me in our Nova first, but that didn't work well for our first-year marriage, so my sister took over - more productive. That skill came in handy especially in Kosovo, where we had to have a 4 wheel drive Isuzu in case of evacuation through the mountains. We drove that Trooper everywhere. A colleague first drove it down from Denmark to Macedonia, and in the 9 years after that it went south and back north through Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, France and Germany.
Driving the truck today, I felt like a part of my brain and soul woke up! Such a trivial thing - but I felt more myself with my left foot working, my right hand on the gear shift, moving without thinking about it, controlling the truck. All those other countries (and accompanying people, conversations, experiences) settled a bit more in my head.
I'm seriously thinking about buying a Beetle.
I grew up in Volkswagen vans, a white one certainly, with a backwards-facing seat behind the driver that definitely belonged to my oldest brother. There might have been a red one, and possibly a blue one? I can smell them still, although obviously I can't see them!(See the three VW vans in the parking lot far away in this photo of the four of us plus 3 cousins? One of those is ours....)
My uncle went for VWs as well, but the Bugs rather than the vans. Deep, low back seats that inevitably made me carsick (dark blue for sure)...eventually he sold one to my sister, who sold it to my younger brother, who spray-painted it in a camouflage print.
I learned how to drive stick shift in one of our vans, in the high school parking lot. Mark tried to teach me in our Nova first, but that didn't work well for our first-year marriage, so my sister took over - more productive. That skill came in handy especially in Kosovo, where we had to have a 4 wheel drive Isuzu in case of evacuation through the mountains. We drove that Trooper everywhere. A colleague first drove it down from Denmark to Macedonia, and in the 9 years after that it went south and back north through Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, France and Germany.
Driving the truck today, I felt like a part of my brain and soul woke up! Such a trivial thing - but I felt more myself with my left foot working, my right hand on the gear shift, moving without thinking about it, controlling the truck. All those other countries (and accompanying people, conversations, experiences) settled a bit more in my head.
I'm seriously thinking about buying a Beetle.
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