October 11, 2013. Road trip.

A few days ago, I noticed, in a parking lot at Stonestown, a VW bus, probably from the 60s or 70s. It looked like it was well taken care of. Painted red, white, and blue, it was adorned with peace signs, little flags, a smiley face or two, and so on. I saw it again this afternoon, on Geary Boulevard. The sight cheered me, and reminded me of the summer of 1968, when I and four friends travelled in a VW bus down the west coast, from Vancouver to Los Angeles, and on across the United States, to Detroit, where the three of us who remained, returned to Canada. We dropped one person off in Hamilton, and went on to Montreal, where I got off. The owner, the last person in the VW, drove on. The trip included one very wet night along the Oregon coast, when the five of us crammed into the van and tried to sleep, unsuccessfully. There was a breakdown early one morning on a very lonely highway in Arizona, a layover of several days in Seligman AZ, while we waited for parts to come from Phoenix, and a 54-hour non-stop dash across the country, to get the van's owner as close as possible to Yale U, where he had to register for a PhD program in a few days. He made it. I've never had a road trip like it since, although I had a driving adventure in Sweden a few years ago, which featured a blow-out, a brake failure, and other excitements. But that is another story.