VW ADVENTURES

A Place To Share Your VW Stories.

September 20, 2010
by Julia
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Jerome Jamboree

It looks like another fun Jerome Jamboree!  These are great ‘Before’ and ‘After’ views of the campground at the Gold King Mine (compliments of Tom Jessing).

Of course, then on Sunday, everyone goes home and it looks like ‘Before’ again!

At this huge VW Campout and show, held every September at the Gold King Mine in Jerome, Arizona, you will experience  a great gathering of an amazing variety of Volkswagens: buses, campers, bugs, and other miscellaneous vehicles, tents, trailers and sleeping accommodations!

Even ‘Walter’ the Bus made it up to the Gold King Mine- no small feat! (photo by Stephen Ford. Click here for more pics of Jerome Jamboree XX from Steve)

September 11, 2010
by Tommy
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Gehrke Windmills

We are happily driving along the Columbia River, heading toward the Grand Coulee Dam and envious of the gorgeous flat water for boating.  A benefit of traveling in a VW Westy Camper Bus is the convenience of stopping for a picnic whenever you want. so even if we can’t be on the water we can enjoy being next to the water when we stop for a picnic lunch in the park-like grounds of a rest area at Electric City just west of the dam.

Pulling into the rest area, we are intrigued by a fenced area about 50 feet square that is filled with a variety of contraptions with moving parts – windmills and whirlgigs. A sign identifies the “Gehrke Windmill Garden”.  Apparently a resident of Electric City, Mr. Emil Gehrke, contrived these contraptions from scrap, displaying them in his back yard. After his death, a group of locals established this roadside attraction.

Read more about it and see more pictures here.

August 23, 2010
by Julia
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Crazy Creativity – VW shaped House & Restaurant

These are just too much fun and need to be shared with everyone! Such amazing creativity….

Meet The VW Beetle House And Restaurant

by Orillia Volkswagen

In Europe, one man has designed two buildings. One of them is a house, the other is a restaurant and bar. Both of those buildings look like Volkswagen Beetles. This strike anyone else as a bit weird? The top shot is the restaurant; you can see the house below. As the old saying goes, you can live in your car, but you can’t drive your house. Or maybe you can — kind of. Maybe more houses need to be shaped like cars, just so we never have to stop thinking about (Corn alert! Corn alert! Corn alert!) the endless human road trip and the ribbon of highway we call life.

Or maybe this is still a little weird. The man is architect Markus Voglreiter. The house, which is in a cozy suburban neighborhood near Salzburg, Austria, was completed in 2003. It features car-dork details like suspension-themed interior columns, exterior “tires,” and headlight-shaped windows.

The restaurant, dubbed The Car, was completed in 2007 and is located north of Salzburg. It reportedly cost €1.6 million to build — proof, as it were, that no good idea goes unrewarded escapes being beaten into the ground.

August 11, 2010
by Julia
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Rendez-vous in the Rain

It is pouring down rain and has been off and on (mostly on!) for several days — unusual for Flagstaff, Arizona.

Just a short time into our campout all the seals in the bus swelled, stopping the leaks, and we have been ‘snug as a bug’ in our ’61 Westy camper with our side tent and ‘vestibule’.

It has rained all night and  we are not looking forward to packing up this morning–in the rain.  As we break camp, folding up and storing a very soggy tent, we are happy to have a brief respite from the rain, which lasts just long enough for us to get the tent put away. The drips start again as we put the last of our gear into the camper and by the time we drive out of the campground and head to a gas station, the rain is coming down hard again.

Behold! A Ray of Sunshine–

Pulling into the gas station, we are delighted to see a brightly painted bus from Quebec, Canada, refueling on the other side of the pumps. We laugh and grab the camera for a picture.

The owner also laughs, and after ‘posing’ for us, grabs his camera, sharing in the fun of this unexpected ‘rendez-vous’ of fellow VW Campers.

We learn that Mark and his son, Philip, are traveling the U.S.A in their bay-window camper bus and have been on the road about 27 days at this point.

Mark asks for directions to a destination on their itinerary so we both pull to the side, away from the pumps.

Again, the rain stops long enough for us to confer and look at the map without getting drenched. We take a few more pictures then with a hearty ‘Bon Voyage’, we each go our own way.

August 7, 2010
by Tommy
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The GRAND Coulee

Heading to the Grand Coulee Dam, we hum along in our ’61 VW Camper driving across the dry land area of Big Bend, past the combination of dry land and irrigated farming and into some rather desolate country side. From one view, it appears to be a giant deep cut through the landscape.

We cross over a dry river bed. This is the ‘Grand Coulee’ — an ancient river bed formed 10,000-15,000 years ago during the Missoula Floods and left dry when the river found it’s present course creating a ‘big bend’ away from the Grand Coulee–hence, the Big Bend dry land farm area.

With lava canyon edges and ridges,  scruffy sagebrush and tumbleweeds, it looks similar to the area around the Snake River Canyon in southern Idaho.  We cross over a dry river bed.

Rounding a corner a ribbon of water  looking  inviting in this rugged country. We are back to the Columbia River!  This is a fun drive in our VW Bus around the curves and along the water.

We keep on moving up the river (actually Banks Lake formed by a low earthen dam below the massive Grand Coulee Dam)  past beautiful flat water that makes us want to get out on a ski and ride for miles; and past the impressive Steamboat Rock, once an island in the Columbia River bed and a long-established landmark used by nomadic Native Americans and early settlers.  Almost no boats are on the water–one stretch of 7 or 8 miles and not a single boat.

Even when we get to the “populated” area there is only a handful of boats in the water. This is once more,  another place on the beautiful Columbia River we would like to return to — next time with our water skis and maybe a boat, behind a ’61 Westy???  Why not!