Once you've had a car that offers room to walk around, a kitchen and comfortable sleeping accommodation, it's hard to be satisfied with anything less. One day I found a red VW van that had spent its first 40,000 miles delivering flowers and seemed to resolve most of the obvious shortcomings of The Can. It had the big 1600cc motor, no obvious rust or dents and even seemed to drive somewhat better. I later sprang for a set of Michelin radials instead of the cardboard cross (bias) ply tires and the improvement was almost unbelievable. It even had a stereo system, in the form of a rather gaudy 8-track player that I never found any cartridges for.
This van immediately turned out to be an excellent vehicle for me, and even passed the Driving In Snow test with flying colors when I was caught in a snowstorm on the Yorkshire Moors. It ascended a steep snow-covered hill with no problem, assisted only by a large friend, and an even larger police officer, bouncing in unison on the rear bumper. The practical aspect became important almost immediately when I moved from England to Holland and was able to carry everything I needed with ease.
Actually, the van was very useful that following winter when I was traveling almost daily across the North of Holland to a factory, carrying computer equipment. Useful, but not comfortable, because the heater didn't work (no surprise, it was an air-cooled VW). Once again, I found that people would refuse to travel with me. I had the heater fixed by the local VW dealer, but the only difference that made was that it no longer pumped exhaust fumes. When I pointed this out, the response was "what do you expect, it's air cooled?". Or perhaps it was my imperfect understanding of Dutch. Either way, it was nice when spring came.
With the warmer weather came the opportunity to convert the Van to a Can, which I had been planning on doing ever since I bought it. I found a conversion that I liked, and decided that it was worth paying somebody else to do the work. Partially because, for the first time, I was rich enough to do that, partly because I was short of time and partly because my neighbors hadn't been keen when I installed a radio in a car outside my home and furniture would have been just too much for them. Off to England for a week, and what a difference. Instead of a delivery van, I now had a camper with the works (bed, cooker, & the kitchen sink). And this time I even had a pop-top so not only could I walk around inside, I could walk around while standing up.
The newly-converted Can was just the thing! I started to make weekend (and longer) trips through nearby countries: Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. I got into the habit of just pulling over at the side of the road without bothering to look for a campground, and had many wonderful weekends this way. The only real problem was the Easter trip when I converted a distance from Km to miles, decided it wasn't too bad for a long weekend and was well into the journey before I realized that the distance had already been miles -- that was a long, long, long weekend (but I still remember the places that I found).
The time came to leave Holland and once again this was the perfect vehicle. I mooched around England for a little while, stayed with friends and took some classes. All the time I had my accommodation with me.
And then I was offered a job in Spain, loaded up The Can and headed South. I got as far as the hoverport at Ramsgate. As I lined up to drive aboard the hovercraft, BANG!. Oops. If it had lasted just a few minutes longer, I would have been trying to find out what the French was for "clutch cable" and probably lost a good deal of time and effort. As it was, I was aboard the next hovercraft one hour later with a new clutch cable. (As an aside, I had the incredible good fortune to talk my way into the jump-seat in the cockpit, and a wonderful experience that was!) The Can was looking out for me, I believe that it may have saved my life later -- read on. The journey to Madrid took three days; partly because there was no great hurry, and partly because the oil consumption increased exponentially if I exceeded 50mph (shot front oil seal, never got round to fixing it). It was a nice trip through nice country. A few things stand out, like the chateau whose grounds I stayed in the second night and crossing the border into Spain and seeing people in swimsuits on the beach on October 1st -- if you've spent your whole life in Northern Europe that looks as astonishing as Martians wearing swimsuits.
Once again, I had everything with me that I needed to set up a home. The only automotive problem was that parking was extremely difficult in the area of central Madrid where I went to live. This turned out not to be so bad because I would often take the metro and bus to work -- Madrid in the late 1970s wasn't a great place to drive, but the public transport was good. Almost immediately I started to use the Can for weekend trips, and it was very easy to just stop wherever I wanted to (the only time I ever used a campground in Spain was a disaster). I made many trips, and stayed on beaches, alongside roads, in parking lots and wherever else was convenient. One night, I remember becoming lost late near the Portuguese border with no lights to be seen anywhere on the horizon, and simply pulling off onto a flat, grassy area and going to sleep. I was woken in the next dawn's half light by a herd of sheep walking by with their shepherd and looked out at a flat landscape of drystone walls and sheep that had nothing but the narrow road to tell me which century I was in.
And then there was the day that could have been a Very Bad Day, but turned out to be just annoying. The fuel gauge in The Can was somewhat approximate. When the tank was full the gauge was correct but within fifty miles it was showing empty, so I'd become accustomed to keeping the tank full and checking mileage. So it was that one day I found myself caught short, so to speak, in a crowded area of Madrid that I didn't know well. The first fuel station I found was very small and very hard to get into because of a small site, buildings clustered close to it and vehicles parked everywhere. Normally I would have passed it by, but at that time oil products were a state monopoly, so you knew that there wouldn't be another option nearby (the other side of this was that small villages that couldn't profitably support a gas station had one). Anyway... I had the tank filled, jumped back in turned the key, the engine ground away and... nothing much happened. The engine turned over, sure enough, but it didn't start. I had no idea what to do at this stage because the engine on The Can had never, ever failed to start. I tried again; nothing. Tried a couple more times; nothing, dead as a doornail. Not the tiniest attempt to run.
The answer to "now what?" seemed to be to go to the back, open the door and look for a label saying "Move this if the engine doesn't start". So I did.
"Funny, smells a bit of fuel in here. What's this pool of stuff sloshing around? Did it rain?".
And then it hit me: The air cooling arrangement effectively put the upper half of the engine in a tray that stretched about an inch deep all around it. This tray was now full of gasoline. The top half of the engine was soaked in it, and it was resting in a pool of the stuff. A steady stream of gasoline was entering the pool as I watched. Later I found that a small section of rubber hose that formed part of the tank vent system failed, and if this happens with the tank full, then the top few gallons can be (and were being, as I watched) siphoned out of the tank and held bathing the engine. Immediately forward of the engine is the fuel tank, which was full. The spark plugs and HT leads were touching the pool and the distributor just above it. By now, the starter and its (spark-producing) brushes were bathed in gasoline.
I looked around. There were dozens of people within a few feet of me. There was gridlock on the narrow street. The forecourt of the little gas station was packed with cars, trucks and people. The buildings towering close around obscured the sky. It was a hot day, and the air above the sidewalk shimmered in the summer heat and smog.
If the engine had started, we would have been looking at the spectacular urban renewal of the immediate area. I would have made a prime spot on the TV news, albeit not in recognizable form. I really don't remember what happened next, except that it ended with The Can being towed off to be mended. I didn't begrudge the repair -- it was looking out for me. That was the only time that it ever failed to start.
Speaking of repairs... I'd moved to an apartment a little out of town, near my work at the airport. About ten minutes or so on foot from my front door was the main spares and service center for Mevosa, the importer for Volkswagen and Mercedes. This was before the Spanish car builder SEAT started a relationship with VW. So Volkswagens, and particularly Type 2 Volkswagens, were extremely rare in Spain and the proximity of Mevosa was good news. It turned out, though, that Mevosa had a very pragmatic approach to customer service: They were always very busy and you stood in a long line for parts or service. One line for Mercedes and one line for Volkswagen. They would take customers in order from the Mercedes line until it was empty. Then they would start work on the Volkswagen line until somebody arrived in the Mercedes line (or break time arrived), at which point the cycle would start again. You could wait for a long time in the VW line.
I looked forward so little to my visits to Mevosa that at one point I made a weekend visit to England to buy four constant-velocity joints (the difference between English and Mevosa prices paid for most of the air fare). Unfortunately they weighed something like twenty pounds apiece, which didn't seem like an issue until I checked in for my El-Cheapo charter flight and found I was limited to forty pounds of baggage. In total. My limited powers of persuasion were sorely taxed getting two of them aboard in my hand baggage, and it wasn't comfortable walking around the airport with the other two twenty pound CV joints in my trouser pockets.
Happy days, and the perfect vehicle for what I was doing.
But then came a piece of bad news. The chief of police was a friend of somebody high up in the company I was providing services for, and told him that he was going to start pursuing the cars that foreigners were keeping in the country illegally. So "his" foreigners had better get things tidied up. Spanish industry was highly protected in those days, to the extent that it was next to impossible to import a car unless you knew somebody and paid import tax of over 100%. After a futile week or so spent trying to legitimize The Can, it looked like it was time for it to go home. So I spent one final weekend driving it in the beautiful mountains of the North, and boarded the ferry at Santander for a 36 hour passage to Plymouth and home.
The next car was very different