road-trip

February started off with a mad hair extension craze. Leena went color crazy putting all sorts of extensions in her hair. In her usual zealous way, she took all the hair off her barbie and started re-hairing her. Regrettably, that project is currently on hold. I fear that it is going to need my input before the poor Barbie gets her mane back. While on the topic of incomplete projects, I would like to happily report that my Ganesha art work finally is complete after I stuck the cutout on a black background. This project stood in limbo for two years before I finally got it done. I guess there’s hope for Barbie after all! We did put up a bunch of art work made by the girls. Slowly but surely, we have been moving ahead.

Johan and Tanya made a dog cart for Rosie. Her back paws are now completely unfunctional. Picking her back up for a walk is a heavy task. It is also dangerous for her, since her paws flip while dangling. If the walker is not watching, her paws can end up scratched and bloody. Rosie loved her cart. It has been useful in giving her front end some much needed exercise. She even gave Kylo Ren a chase! It was back to the good ol’ times.

Other than that, it was another month, another car for Elf land. Johan bought a BYD electric car from Lehigh University. Johan, Rosie and I decided to go to pick it up leaving the (elated) kids behind with Kylo Ren. We left one evening and made a little trip out of it. We ate, slept, drove, slept some more and moved until we reached Bethlehem, PA. They had our favorite Waffle shop, so we got to enjoy some grits!

After breakfast, we checked out an electric BYD city bus that Johan was also bidding on. It was nice enough, although a lot of work to make into a camper. We then went to see the car. My friend Sushil lives there, so our plan was to meet up and for me to visit his office and lab while Johan did the paperwork. It went without a hitch. I had a fun time checking out Sushil’s lab. He is a professor at Lehigh Valley.

Once back, we left town as quickly as we could. The drive was uneventful. We came back around 4 pm. The BYD electric car is a nice addition with quite a long range by our standards.

Other than buying vehicles at regular intervals, Tanya has been spending some time behind the wheel learning how to drive. She is learning stick shift on our super cool Mercedes jeep and automatic on our (other super cool) electric car Solectria. In short, life has been chugging along.

Rosie the dog: Well my friends. I am okay with life chugging along, but why, oh why, would one take a 100 year old grandma dog on a road trip? I really don’t need that kind of chugging. But that’s precisely what happened the other day. Just because I looked somewhat eager to get into the van, my mommy and Papa decided to take me along for an overnight trip. I must say, I was pretty rattled, physically and emotionally. I literally trembled for many miles before a familiar smell calmed me down. When my people stepped out of the car, and came in with foody smells, my brain fog cleared and a smell made it’s way into the depths of my memory. That was the smell of sausage. Instantly, I could remember all the times we hit the road, and how my people would come back with meaty treats. Life was not so bad after that. I had a merry old time in the back of the van, howling to my heart’s content and getting all the meaty treats without having to share them with Kylo Ren. I still trembled, but it was more out of excitement than nervousness. Despite all the positives, I was happy when we got home. Home works well for a dog my age. Let’s hope my humans don’t plan anymore such adventures.

Kylo Ren the dog: I don’t have much to report about this month. But my life was not devoid of excitement. Tanya took me inside a store! We walked through the dog aisle and my eyes popped out! Here were rows of treats at my snout’s reach! Oh, if only I didn’t have the awful muzzle on, I could have eaten my bellyful. Unfortunately, it was not to be (sigh). One good thing was that I did get a pig ear on my way out by the generous store people. The bad thing is, I don’t like pig ears. I am a civilized dog and don’t appreciate such barbaric treats. I did eat it though. It wasn’t too bad (yum).

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.