Homecoming

We made it.  1200 miles, 25 driving hours, and one Georgia Peach Spa (read: probable brothel), and we’ve now made it safely home with our 1967 VW bus parked comfortably in her new garage.  What follows is the somewhat epic, and yet also mind-numbingly boring account of bringing this thing home: We left Orlando at 10:30 AM.  Our plan was to wake up at 6, but clearly that didn’t happen despite a few wake up calls and multiple snooze attempts.  The jeep started right up after the previous night’s fiasco,  and we got on our way.  The drive was long, and, thankfully pretty uneventful.  We hit traffic in Atlanta, checked the trailer rig in the parking lot of what I think might have been a Georgia whorehouse, and slept at a truckstop outside of Nashville.When we arrived in Chicagoland, all I needed to do was back the bus off the trailer and park it in the garage.  Small problem – my experience with driving a manual transmission is… minimal…. non-existent.  No worries though, I can do this!  I shift to neutral, turn the key, engine purrs to life – the bus starts with no hesitation.  I shift to reverse, slowly lift my foot off the clutch, the bus starts to shudder slightly, I apply some gas, the shuddering instensifies, and I apply more gas, and then … it dies!  This happened 3 times, on the forth attempt, the engine wouldn’t even turn over.  We panic – I can’t drive this thing, what are we doing here, I’ve got a bus on a trailer blocking half the parking lot that doesn’t start and I’m completely clueless.  Then it starts raining, check that… thunderstorming.

Ok this is getting out of hand – fast forward 30 minutes.  The rain has stopped, and I’ve Googled how to start a VW bus in reverse and realized the shift pattern is different, and I was trying the start the bus in 4^th gear… duh.  We dug out our battery charger, got the engine started back up, and made another attempt to get this thing off the trailer and into the garage.  I shift to reverse (fo real this time), slowly lift my foot off the clutch and the bus starts to move backwards. Yes!  In my jubilation, I lift my foot completely off the clutch, applied pressure to the brakes OOPS that’s the gas! The bus flew off the back of the trailer.  From Noelle’s perspective, it was strikingly similar to the launching of the Space Shuttle.  From my perspective, I didn’t even realize I was on the ground until I shut the engine off.  It wasn’t pretty but at least we’re off the trailer, and I didn’t break anything as far as I can tell.  A few more stalled engine attempts, and I was finally able to idle into the garage.  A fitting cap to a long two day journey.  I bought a bus, now I need to figure out how to fix it up.