At that time I worked on Saturdays at a boatyard. Sometimes customers would arrive to take over their boat before we were ready for them. One day this happened with a family who arrived in a Volkswagen camper. Instead of doing what most people did (sitting uncomfortably in the car or hanging around looking bored), they popped up the top so they could walk around inside, put the kettle on for a cup of tea and generally looked as comfortable as if they were in their own living room. This impressed me as being a true luxury car.
When customers made a one-way trip by boat, somebody would move their car. And sometimes, somebody was me. I immediately volunteered to move that camper from Wheaton Aston to Llangollen, and fell in love with the thing somewhere in the sixty mile journey.
After looking at a few VW camper conversions, I found a 1961 (I think) split-window that was affordable. It wasn't a factory conversion, in fact it had been done as an amateur project. It was pretty nice, with a pleasant wood interior (the man who converted it was said to be a cabinet maker. It wasn't perfect, of course: The main ventilation was through a hole rusted through the passenger-side wheel well, it had no pop-top and much of the bodywork was rusty -- but all (well..., mostly) in non-structural places. The engine was only 1200cc, the lowest powered that VW had made in recent years, and drank oil by the gallon. (Luckily there was a handy storage place for two one-gallon oil cans.) The heater didn't work of course, but it would have been a surprise to find an air-cooled VW that did have a functional heater.
The Can was a gem, I really loved this vehicle. But you had to approach it with the right attitude: Instead of 0-60 acceleration times, I was able to think of places to go in it. I made quite a few overnight trips in The Can, and it was sheer joy to travel in. The engine was so far away that somebody described it as sounding like a motorcycle following behind (and it certainly felt like shifting gears in somebody else's car). I was happy to accept that the only time it was exciting to drive was in a cross-wind.
The odd thing is, though, that performance is relative. The sad truth was that The Can had difficulty getting out of its own way when it was in perfect working condition, but then it blew two valves and in this condition was truly slow. I drove it in this state for about a week before deciding that I needed to get it fixed. On the way home, with a full set of valves, I was suddenly astonished to find that we were (it was the kind of vehicle that made you think of you and it as "we") traveling at over 70mph! I had got used to fully opening the throttle and leaving it there. I found it relatively easy to get used to the on-road behavior too, despite some of my friends' refusal to drive it on the grounds that "it keeps trying to dive off the road".
I wasn't the only person driving a VW bus in those days, of course. These gentlemen seem to have enjoyed similar tastes to mine. They're a little better known, of course.
The Can taught me a lot that I would just as soon not have learned, and the valve-blowing episode gave me a chance to ride quite a few miles on a Honda moped that I had (misguidedly) acquired. The most unwanted skill that I learned from this vehicle was the ability to push-start a VW bus without assistance when the starter proved chronically troublesome. And the most unwanted lesson it taught me was that it's a bad idea to sell a vehicle that you like in order to get something that seems (on the face of it) more sensible. Which brings us to The Herald...