Funkengroovin Wednesday - Covered

During the summer months, in Cairo, you will see many cars covered to protect them from the minute bits of sand that accumulate daily. VB is posting from Maine today. (The last photo is not a VW. It's just cool looking.)

NEWS:
Not so much about VWs this week, but apparently the international community has picked up interest in Egypt's new traffic laws.

BOOM AND GLOOM: NEW TRAFFIC LAW BRINGS BUSINESS AND FEAR
'“So now they will confiscate our licenses and we’ll have to pay baksheesh (a bribe) to get the license back. It’s no use, we Egyptians will never change our ways,” Hussein said."'

"Analysts say the law was not well thought-out, and tries to apply foreign rules without considering needs and challenges peculiar to Egypt.

The law shows a “complete disassociation from reality,” political analyst Amr Choubaki wrote in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

“The issue here is a breakdown of public performance and of the crumbling and corrupt administration,” he said. “We don’t need a new law, we needed the old one to be implemented.”

Egyptian roads are among the most dangerous in the world. Around 6,000 people die each year in accidents and 30,000 are injured, according to transport ministry figures."

"I feel as if I am in a circus all the time"
"That’s what one tourist said about Cairo traffic. But as of late there’s some new laws on the book aimed to calming the country’s famously manic traffic. Readers of the book will know of my interest in corruption and how that trickles down to traffic, and it’s no exception here. The question is: When laws are made stronger (ostensibly with a reformist goal) in a place plagued by corruption, does it improve things or simply raise the rent-seeking abilities of corrupt officials?"

'THE LAW IS COMPLETELY DIVORCED FROM REALITY'

New Traffic Laws Frustrate Taxi Drivers In Egypt

Egypt starts drive to remove antiquated taxis from its roads
"Thousands of state workers supplement their meagre salaries by driving a cab in a country where about a fifth of the population lives on less than $1 (R7.80) a day.

The number of taxi drivers ballooned in the 1990s, when government decrees allowed any car to be converted into a taxi and permitted banks to give car loans, according to Khaled el-Khamissi, author of Taxi, a book about Cairo cabbies."

Egypt wants antiquated taxis off its roads

Egypt: What's Beyond Traffic?!
"Several groups have been created on Facebook in opposition to the new law. “We are in Egypt, bribes will be paid, connections will be used, and tributes will be imposed. The children of ministers and members of parliament will be exempt of this law,” read a comment on the social networking website, Facebook."

The World's Most Dangerous Roads
"Also on their list: The link between Egypt's scuba diving resorts along the Red Sea and the ancient southern city of Luxor. By any measure, the Luxor-Hurghada Road (photo) is a death trap. At night, drivers speed across the dusty desert with their headlights off, setting the stage for head-on collisions.

Ironically, the only thing more dangerous than driving on the Luxor-Hurghada Road at night with your headlights off is driving at night with them on. Bandits, brigands and even terrorists patrol the road in the darkness in search of easy prey."



Australian classic auto hoard discovered
"As might be expected given the location, the bulk of the cars are of British or Australian origin, ranging from well-known brands such as ...

... Jaguar and Rolls-Royce to names less familiar to Americans."

Flying along in a great big, er, box
"A VW Caddy Maxi van was delivered to my front door. Cute, appealing, practical, a wonderful workhorse, really. And with a superb 1.9-litre diesel engine that surprised many highway drivers.

But heck, it took me right back to those bad old days. The Caddy, you see, has a great big box behind it (albeit pretty stylish) and no rear-view mirror in the cab because there is no rear view."


Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City

Funkengroovin - Terryville, CT Bug-A-Fair Slideshow

Flickr now has a slide show option, which you can embed onto your site. VB has uploaded 104 photos from the Terryville Bug-A-fair onto her flickr pages. For those of you who don't venture onto flickr, you can see the whole slide show here. You can make it full screen, as well by clicking on the four arrows in the lower right corner. Use esc button (as usual) to come back here. Enjoy.

Funkengroovin Wednesday - Maadi Has A Woodie

Last week VB received two e-mails, but the comments were somehow not recorded on the blog page:

kaya has left a new comment on your post "Funkengroovin - Terryville, CT Bug-A-Fair 2":

"OOh I love that interior too. And those Beetles all in a row is adorable."

kaya has left a new comment on your post "Funkengroovin - Terryville, CT Bug-A-Fair 2":

"Sometimes I find it hard to open the comments box. Is it my inability or something to do with my comp."

Kaya: Thanks, VB really likes that red interior, and thinks it would look great in the '65 Beetle Convertible she and The Boss Man are having restored. (But, The Boss Man wants an engine that will get about 100 horsepower.) We have started working on it again, so VB hopes to post some photos eventually.

As for the comments, VB has no idea what happened. Not all the Blogger elements work on her computer, since she's a MAC user - most (but not all) work with Firefox, and not so well with Safari. Blogger seems to be very compatible with Windows though. VB did notice that you posted at the same time they had provided a new element to the page layout (which didn't really even show up for VB until a few days later.) VB sat and held her breath, thinking that the comment would surely show up. Only a humorous quote from Little Britain seems to explain it: "The computer says noo."


VB found this Beetle conversion in Maadi, Digla one day. You don't see these around too often.







(Below): A Beetle playing Peek-A-Boo - somewhere on the way to Carrefore.



(Below two photos): Another Beetle conversion from the "Bug-A-Fair" in Terryville, CT. Take note: Engine is up front.






Please see previous post for all the news.

VB goes to New Hampshire this weekend for The Rhubarb Tour of A Prairie Home Companion live, with Garrison Keillor, on Sunday evening.

Next Tuesday she takes the Vanagon to Jon in Maine for a new speedometer, and a tachometer. Included in this trip, would be a visit to the Freeport, Maine flagship LL Bean Store (open 24 hours, 365 days a year!)

Since it's the summer, and we're off on a few day trips, here's a favorite song of VB's from all those "National Lampoon Vacation" movies:

National Lampoon's Vacation Original Theatrical Trailer


Just for extra fun, here's a photo of Six Flags New England, which is not far from our house. As a matter of fact, we get all kinds of dimwits driving through our small town, en route to this abomination! (VB hates amusement parks. She does not think they're very amusing, at all.)

Funkengroovin News

As promised last week -The newwws!

GENERAL NEWS:

Bad Dad: Letting Kids Drive
"When Michael Schumacher was just four years old, his dad put a small motor on his pedal cart. Schumi promptly ran the cart into a light post, so his parents decided to take him to a track. Two years later, he was the karting club's champion ... three decades later, he retired as the best driver that Formula One has ever seen."

Dominate Your Son's Pinewood Derby
"A father-son team muffing a three-legged race is one thing, but doing poorly at the Cub Scout pinewood derby? Welcome to loserville. Here's how not to let the tyke down."

France's August traffic jam

No Cash For Clunkers

Cramer Comet Lands on Pebble Beach
"Back in the days when gas was cheap, the planet was cool and a carbon footprint meant you had oil on your shoe, the easiest way to make a car go like hell was to stuff the biggest engine you could find under the hood. Few people took that basic tenet of hot rodding to greater extremes than Tom Cramer, who shoehorned a 1,350-horsepower airplane engine into a one-off custom called, appropriately, the Cramer Comet."

The Art of the Restoration
"To win the top prize at a prestigious car show, owners don’t just take the muscle car they owned as a teenager and give it a shine.

So what separates a nice, shiny old car from a potential Pebble Beach winner?

“First and foremost is the quality of the project — the car itself,” said Don McLellan of RM Auto Restorations of Blenheim, Ontario, which has done the work on several Best of Show winners. “It’s got to have the flow of design, history, provenance, rarity. Most are one-of-a-kind cars, such as the 1931 Daimler Double Six we restored. It was a show car when new. You’ve got to start with a great one.”'

(Check out the rest of the story and related video too.)
As Gas Prices Swell, Trailers Shrink
"If this trend were a movie it would be called “Honey, I Shrunk the Camper.”

BRIAN ENDTER’S 30-day road trip this summer from his home in Bend, Ore., to his native lands of the Midwest unfolded like an American greatest-hits tour: national park campgrounds, stops in the Tetons, a visit to Old Faithful. His 6- and 4-year-old sons were ecstatic when a buffalo wandered through their Yellowstone campsite, and they relaxed in his dad’s cabin in northern Wisconsin. Good times. The funny thing was, the trip wouldn’t have happened but for one thing: a new trailer/tent hybrid called the SylvanSport Go.

By day, the Go is a gear-hauling utility trailer. At night, it opens into a hard-roofed tent that sleeps four. The willowy unit weighs only 800 pounds, meaning the Endters can tow it with their four-cylinder Honda CR-V. Their gas mileage dropped from 27 or 28 miles per gallon to 21 or 22 m.p.g., but that now seems like a small price to pay."



At Home on the Road
"For one couple, falling in love with a vintage motor home turned out to be as fraught as falling in love with a Victorian house."


Slow-Moving Vehicle
"An alternate title for this surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheel might be “Idiots.”

Traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature. While this is bad news for drivers — there’s not much to be done about human nature — it is good news for readers of Tom Vanderbilt’s new book. “Traffic” is not a dry examination of highway engineering; it’s a surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels."


A photogallery of Junkyard Treasures, from the L.A. Times.

No Keys? No Worries. How to Hot-Wire Your Car.

Earthtalk: Are oil changes necessary every 3,000 miles?

VW NEWS:

BITTEN BY THE LOVE BUG FOR BEETLES
"I've been through just about every aspect of old VW ownership – the rescue, the rehabilitation, the joy of driving, the agony of a blown valve, the rebuild, the discovery of another problem, the expensive restoration ad nauseam. And I only come out of it each time with a powerful lust for more old Volkswagens.

What would I do if I blew a valve in my father's Toyota? Well, I would be completely lost. Though it burns me to my male core to say this, I couldn't begin to know how to fix it...

Repair of the old Volkswagen is much less daunting. To fix a FUBAR carburetor, simply string together a combination of swear words unique enough to impress the vehicle and you are back on the road. To repair a blown fan belt, simply borrow a pair of pantyhose, tie them together at the ends, and put them in the fan belt's place. The air-cooled Volkswagen makes you feel like MacGyver."'

No Lemons Here
"Today, they're mostly sticking to the plums. This Volkswagen ad from China may seem a bit risque for the market, but what better way to demonstrate the continued relevance of an iconic 1960s vehicle than through images of two women one in 60s attire and one wearing an absurdly short minidress?"

(Video and story)
Chattanooga man turns VWs into trucks and other vehicles

Karmann Ghia Sold for Record Price

'Bottle Shock': A Giddy Ode to Vino
"As for the trucks, they're all over the place, along with a one-eyed, limping, primer-smeared VW Beetle, as symbols of the surfer/hippie-like culture that prevailed in Napa in those years, before it acquired swank, class and really expensive motels, the emblems of success."

Volks folks rally to camper van circuit

'Taking Woodstock' brings taste of Hollywood to local town
"Both sides of the road are being transformed into Sullivan County, NY, circa 1969, in the days leading up to the now legendary Woodstock festival. The movie is being directed by Ang Lee, of "Brokeback Mountain" fame...

One of the New Lebanon businesses seeing a boost is Chuck Geraldi's auto body shop. The filmmakers sent up vintage autos -- like an iconic '60s VW bus -- to him, instructed to get the vehicles functional again.

"I don't see many any more ['60s cars]," Geraldi said. "Getting parts has been an adventure."'

Check out my ride: Shane Stiefel loves his Volkswagen
"For the past 10 years, he’s created a collection of Volkswagens that includes a 1958 Bug, a 1967 Bug, a 1967 Microbus Deluxe, and a 1971 Super Beetle. But the centerpiece is undoubtedly his 1969 Bug."

Car Talk: The wrong wheels on the VW bus

(And they live happily ever after.)
Gap year travel: working in Europe
"With no educational commitments until autumn, Nick Porter and his girlfriend decided to spend the summer working their way around Europe in a campervan."

"As I had once owned a Meccano set, the responsibility of selecting the campervan fell to me. Naturally, our budget wasn’t huge, so I viewed a large number of rusty old wrecks before finding the ideal van: a 30-year-old VW Camper in great nick, which would surely have no problem coping with our European round trip. Famous last words.

Bilbo (as we subsequently named him) made it across the Channel to Rouen, about 150 miles from Calais, before his first mechanical hissy fit. After that we had to make sure we parked on a slope, as otherwise he was too heavy to bump-start. None the less, I could disregard his minor faults because at least he was fun and, as it turned out, more reliable than our would-be employer."

Eccentric England with Rory and Paddy
"The scene was set from the off, with rolling green hillsides and strains of Blake's anthemic Jerusalem as comedian Rory McGrath and Phoenix Nights' Paddy McGuinness took to the roads in a VW camper van. It was an incredibly simple show; you could just hear the back-slapping lads' pitch in the production offices: 'Two disparate comics in a comedy vehicle trying out lots of quirky British pastimes. Easy.'"

Anyone know anything about this VW Transporter?

(Really? - We have these things crawling all over the place. And let VB add, they are ginormous!)
Black widow found in imported van

(Not necessarily about VWs, but James May seems to think he's got it all figured out.)
James May: Here today
"And now, after almost two weeks, and having donated more than half of my equipment to some cash-strapped students in a truly tragic VW Transporter camper van, I am in a position to tell you what is essential for caravan living and, ipso facto, life itself.

Each occupant will need one - but only one -- of the obvious things: fork, knife, spoon, Pyrex plate, cereal bowl, mug. The preparation of any dish cooked by real people rather than TV chefs requires nothing more than the following: small chopping board, large knife, small knife, wooden spoon, wooden spatula, large saucepan, small saucepan, and a poacher of the type that makes the eggs come out like the breasts of Botticelli's Venus. The bottom half (of the poacher, I mean) can be separated and used for frying the bacon. And that is all."

Funkengroovin Wednesday - Terryville, CT Bug-A-Fair 3

News will be posted separately this week.

(Below): Tire on the front of a rusted out Bus.

(Below): The Dunne Buggy.



(Below): Double Trouble.

(Below): One of VB's favorite photos. She loves the patina, and the colors, and the fact that all these owners very artistically / strategically lined up their cars.

(Below): VB's new garden accessory (it would drive her "condo association" members crazy!)


(Below): VB likes this interior.



(Below) VB's 1987 Westfalia Weekender Edition.

Funkengroovin - Terryville, CT Bug-A-Fair 2

From The Bristol Press: Bug-A-Fair

More Photos here, at SmugMug.

Funkengroovin At The Terryville, CT Bug-A-Fair

Yes, VB knows it's not Wednesday, but she has a multitude of photos from the VW "Fair" in Terryville, CT.

Here's a few Van and Bus photos. Enjoy. VB will add more from the show ASAP.
For a more current update (with more photos not shown on the blog, cause there are lots, and lots more) go to her Terryville, CT set on flickr. Oh, and enlarge these, as they really show the autos as they should be seen.













(Below): Three Westfalias. Middle Red Van, belongs to Nevin (check out his snazzy interior below) and the far right White Van belongs to The Boss Man. (Actually, it's in his name, but it was always in use by VB, and now Number One Son seems to think it's his - the cupboard contains a printer and we found a package of printer paper - perhaps due to some political activity he is involved with?)


(Below): Nevin's retro-metro-sexual interior. Pretty nice, eh? VB's jealous!