i had a call from my friend guy, the bass player with the most excellent band ‘actual size’ who told me he was looking to buy a bus….

…stop me if you’ve heard it before…

so anyway, we chat on the phone and i agree to look at a baywindow camper that he and his girlfriend have found… it’s orange and they really like it…
we go over to see the bus and alarm bells sound in the distance…
while the seller – a strange old guy with a flowing white beard, covered in tattoos who apparently liked in a cave in india and is selling the camper so he can move back to the cave (NO, i’m not making this up) – was showing guy & co the nice new cushions i had fun poking my keys throughthe carpet tape and filler in the sills. most of the underside was coated in a nice new thick coat of black bitument type sealer (always a good sign). luckily the rear sill closing panels had escaped the dreaded ‘hide all’ undersealer to give me clear view of the factory original toilet paper filling the ends of the sills.

i made some more discrete holes in the freshfiller-andpaint-over-dodgy-oldrot body panels and suggested we take it for a test drive. it looked like a dog, ran like a dog, drove like a dog. with the nasty whining from the back it even sounded like a dog.
if only we had wanted to buy a dog.

we left discretely and returned to akciddento HQ for coffee and a debriefing. i wanted to burn the bus and push it into the sea, they loved it and wanted to buy it….

we chatted, and chatted. non volkswagen people don’t seem to get it. that you think about how much of it you want to fix yourself before you buy a vehicle… that you steer clear of shiny ones and look for ones with old original paint…
phrases like ‘you just zip out the sill and drop a new chassis crossmember in at the same time’ seem to disconcert them… my suggestion that perhaps a ford or a japanese day van might be more what they are looking for upsets them even more. they want a volkswagen!

after much talk and a snoop through dozens of websites showing buses within their budget rising to buses four times their budget they have this bewildered look in their eyes.

i feel cruel and heartless.

i can almost hear them thinking
‘owning a camper isn’t like this in the adverts’