cars

While the world chases the next new and big car, they have lost something in this rat race. The charm and fun memories that an old car provides. Thanks to my husband and his passion for old cars, I have a treasure trove of car memories. Here are a few!

Story 1: Loony toons

We drove our diesel cars on waste vegetable oil for many years. This required collecting used vegetable oil from restaurants. We had a deal with the local fried chicken restaurant that we would collect their oil for free every week. This worked well for them since they would otherwise have to pay to get their oil hauled away.

Every week, Johan or I would go to pump out the waste vegetable oil from their oil tubs. It was dirty work, but ok, that’s what we did back then.

One fine evening Johan’s employee, a guy who found everything funny, and I went to collect the oil. I was driving and he was in the passenger seat. On our way home after collecting the waste oil, I was driving the main road back home. Just when I was about to make my right turn to the house, the power steering of the old Mercedes that we were driving failed! So, of course, I couldn’t make the turn. Startled, I yelled at the guy that I couldn’t turn. He went into peels of laughter saying that the power steering had died.

Giving him an incredulous look, I shouted, “stop laughing and pull!” We both pulled on the steering wheel together to make the next right turn, in a move that would remind one of an old fashioned cartoon show where the characters pull on the steering wheel together while their faces are clouded with terror at the impending disaster. Only, in this case, my car mate’s face was alight with amusement.

Anyway, the car did grunt and respond to our endeavors and turned at the next right turn. With a few more similar turns around the block, we made it home, with aching arms and a story to remember!

Story 2: Rattling through the West Coast

This happened when Johan and I were dating (point to note, I still married him. Get ready to applaud!). We took a trip through the West Coast in a ford E350. It was oh, so romantic. We were shaken, literally. That’s less because of the romance, and more because the front axle of our car rattled wildly when we drove at certain speeds. I think a bearing was worn out. Johan did try to fix it many times, but she still rattled. When the rattling would start, we would try to change our speed until the poor car calmed down. This meant often driving at slow speeds.

This rattling car gave us many moments of laughter. For instance, Johan had dropped me off at a copy center to make some photocopies while he went to consult a mechanic in Paige, Arizona. Once I was done, I went and sat by a tree. Soon two native American men (one youngish, and another old) sat on either side of me and were talking to me about marrying into their tribe. Sensing trouble, I nodded and smiled at them until I saw Johan at which I ran saying, “That’s my boyfriend. Bye!” to the annoyed duo.

The most sensational moment came when we had to reach Lake Powell to catch a ferry to get across by Friday at 5 pm. The ferry didn’t run over the weekends. Of course, the car rattled, and we slowed down. Finally we made it just in time to see that the last boat had just left the dock. We stood at the dock, stomping and shaking our heads in dismay, when, lo and behold! The ferry turned around. We couldn’t believe our eyes. As we stared, the ferry came closer and closer until it was back. The kindly captain said that he had noticed us and decided to come back to get us. How amazing.

Story 3: Car lost and found

This was in 2019. We took a family trip through the West Coast and were on our way out from Death Valley. We were traveling in a city bus which had been converted into a camper, and towing an old jeep Cherokee. Dog needed to pee, so we stopped for a brief second. Dog ran around the bus and we followed. Then we stopped dead in our tracks. For, the jeep was gone. The tow rod was dragging on the ground minus the jeep!

After recovering from the minor heart attack following this discovery, we turned around, not sure how long ago we had lost the jeep. Death valley is a treacherous landscape, with valleys everywhere. The car could easily have rolled off one of these cliffs. Hoping for the best, we drove, looking for the car. As always, luck was with us. The jeep was found half a mile off road, miraculously intact, sitting straight, not far away from a cliff. It had hit various boulders and had come to a standstill with not much damage. It looked really funny, its back facing the road, like it was angry at being left behind and sulking!

Johan was able to get it driving, and we drove to the nearest town with him driving the bus and me the lucky jeep. Such a beautiful memory. The section of Death Valley that I drove is my favorite section now. I can still visualize that mindboggling landscape.

To finish this story off, we went to Lone Pine, which is the first town near Death Valley. There, as luck would have it, Johan met a guy at a garage who was an excellent welder. He and Johan made a whole new tow rod gear with double the reinforcements so that the jeep could no longer take off for its personal adventures!

More funny old car stories when inspiration strikes.

It came out over breakfast this morning. The story of Johan’s French love who he actually brought over to the US. I should be devastated. But I am a sucker for good stories, so here it is!

When Johan was 21 or 22, before he went into his electronic school in The Netherlands, he went to France with his buddy Hans for a camping trip in his Citroen GS break, a station wagon. They went to campground Chanteraine in the South Eastern part of France. It is close to Nice, France. They both worked for their living expenses while camping. Hans was cleaning the toilets and Johan was doing electrical and mechanical repairs at the campground.

A side story before we get to the main one: While at the campground, Johan repaired a crashed campground Unimog. The campground owner was impressed and spoke about him with the mayor of a nearby small town named Les-Salles-Sur-Verdon. The mayor owned an Alpha Romeo with a broken alternator. He asked Johan to repair it, which Johan did. The mayor was impressed. Since Les-Salles-Sur-Verdon was about 60 km from Draguignan, the nearest big town where they could find technical help (1.5 hrs via a mountainous road), the mayor offered Johan a shop and all the town’s technical work. He would be able to fix their electronics and machines and live in the nice, warm climate. Since Johan was about to start his electronics school, he turned that offer down.

Moving on, Hans and Johan were visiting the nearby beach at Verdonplage. In those days, people drove their cars to the beach. When they arrived, he saw a pretty woman with there with a Citroen DS 20, the car that he had been looking for. That was too good a combination to resist, so he walked over to the woman and asked her about the car (in his best French). While they were speaking, a little boy came out of the water. Oh! Thought Johan. But then he kept the conversation up, still hopeful. But then the husband followed. Johan wisely shifted his attention to the man and expressed his interest in the car. The man said that he was planning on selling it since their family with the kid didn’t fit well in the car. He was looking for a station wagon! Johan said, “hey I have a Station Wagon!”. They were all thrilled. The man asked him to meet him in some town the next day.

It was a mountain town (name’s forgotten). There the man asked him to follow his car. They drove to a large Chateau. Johan worried whether this was mafia(!). But the woman and kid came out of the Chateau. The man had a large tennis court and asked to play. Johan refused. They went swimming instead in their large pool. They bargained over the price over rounds of swimming. The man offered 700 francs. Johan swam a round, and asked for 2500 francs (maybe). Then the man took a round and counter offered. They finally settled on 2000 francs. The wife brought out finger food. They had a nice time. They decided to meet the next day and transfer the title at Draguignan.

The next day all the paperwork was done. As the man was driving off in his station wagon, he said something in French. Johan understood it as, “she needs love”. “No worries”, thought Johan. The station wagon that he had just sold had problems too.

Back at the campground, Johan was in the bathroom when he saw a mole next to him. He caught the mole in a bottle and brought his prize to the car. He set it down on the hood. The mole started scampering on the hood and fell promptly into a hold down to the chassis of the car. Johan got a shock and started looking for it everywhere. But he couldn’t locate the mole. He was traumatized that he had sent a creature to an untimely death. In honor of the mole, he called his car “Molly”. “Molly”, the Citroen DS, was later put into a shipping container and brought over to the US. She now lives in our barn!

After their vacation, Johan and Hans started driving direction Normandy. However, the transmission stopped working. They weren’t able to change gears. The Citroen DS has a complicated transmission, so they took it to a mechanic. He said that it had no hydraulic oil. Uh oh. The hydraulic oil was insanely expensive. The young and poor guys didn’t want to spend money on this. They went further and found a junkyard close to Normandy. They asked the junkyard guy to give them hydraulic oil. He went around with a hammer and punctured all the tanks, while they collected the oil to drive their car home.

The ride home was not without adventure. In those days, there were border patrol at all the European countries. To make his way back to The Netherlands, they had to go through Belgium first. At each border, they had to pay export and import duties. To avoid that, the boys decided to skip the border agents and take a side road into Belgium. They thought that evening would be the best time to escape unnoticed. However, once it got late, they realized that their headlights could be seen for miles! So they drove in twilight with their lights off through tiny dirt roads. Farmers from nearby farms knew what they were doing, and laughed and gave them thumbs up signs. However, they miscalculated the roads in the dark, and ended up only 300 ft behind the border security area. They freaked out and gunned the car! They drove in a frenzy to the nearest town and parked the car behind a church and jumped out expecting cops behind them. Luckily for them, the car chase was a figment of their guilty imagination and no cops followed.

The Dutch border waved them in without a second glance. To finally get the car legal, Johan drove with his dad to the German border. At first the agent didn’t want to give the import papers since the car was already in the country. Johan told him the story truthfully. The agent loved the story and asked him to drive to the next agent, spin his car around and come right back. They gave him his import papers when he drove in! There ends the story of Molly, the Citroen DS.

Molly the mole: Now hang on a minute. Molly’s story hasn’t ended without a word from me. Let me tell you what happened to me, the central character of this (mis) adventure. Here I was one minute, out for my morning sniff in the toilet, and in a bottle in the next minute! Just because I am cute and blind, humans think it’s easy to grab me. So I was grabbed, bottled and placed on a hood. But what the man didn’t know was that I was handier with a bottle than Remi (the rat hero in the movie Ratatouille). I dropped the bottle, scurried all over the hood and jumped into an escape hole before the offending man could say “mole”! This sweet but misinformed youth proceeded to look through the whole car to find me and make sure that I didn’t die from finding in the chassis. Honestly, he spent so much time on looking for me. What he was unaware of was that the chassis had a hidden hole that I had long escaped through. How did I know about this hole, you may ask. Well my friends, having grown up on a campground, I was more intimately familiar with chassis than any auto mechanic you have out there! Years later the guy did find that hole, sans my skeleton!

I watched this youth looking frantically for me all afternoon. I had a nice view of him, sitting in my arm chair on the bathroom ledge with a snack in my hand, and goggles over my eyes (Ok, the last part is a lie. I can’t see, remember?). He lovingly named his car Molly after me. I spent the rest of my days in that blessed campground, happy in the knowledge that somewhere in the world exists a car named after me.