This Blog to be Continued on Word Press

I will be switching this blog -- the VW travel portion at least -- over to Word Press.

They have an iPhone app that works nicely; Blogger does not.  I could post through the web browser on the iPhone, but it's not an app (or device) supported through Google, so there could be formatting issues.

So, because I'm essentially lazy, I'll go with the "easy" route!  Follow the VW portion here:

https://bugnamerica.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/hindsight-is-20-20-and-so-is-the-new-year/

Lake City is Possessed!

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Doing what I love least… trying to be a mek-a-nick.

There is a town in north-central Florida called Lake City.  I don’t like Lake City… at all.  Lake City is evil, and my VW apparently knows this.

We drove there not too long after the previous post was written.  I was overjoyed at how nicely the bug was running; the kinks were gone and we were getting ready to make our big crossing of the U.S.A. from east to west and then back home again.  And then came Lake City…

We had topped off the tank with non-ethanol gasoline and then stopped at the office of the esthetician Valerie uses for about an hour.  When it came time to start up the car and head home, the car had other ideas.  Wow.  It idled, but as soon as your stepped on the gas it just about died.  Maybe we had filled up with bad gas?  We started driving toward home, about 60 miles south of Lake City.

The car had a few tenuous moments at some stop signs, missing and coughing and refusing to go forward in an orderly manner.  Then it started behaving… and we were able to get home in one piece.  I had a very cheap Chinese carburetor being shipped to me, and as soon as it arrived I was going to swap out the one that came with the car and send it back to our Boise, Idaho mechanic to have it rebuilt.

The new carb was an improvement over the original one, but something was still NOT right.  But it would work until the original one was back in my possession.  I had to swap out a distributor that was also questionable; it was a dual vacuum and mechanical advance (VW’s were equipped with some form of vacuum advance, but in these latter days people tend to use the “009” – a mechanical advance distributor with no vacuum). 

I had put the 009 back in the car, tuned and timed the beast and it was running pretty much like it was supposed to – again.  So imagine my surprise when there was an “open house” being held at the esthetician’s office in (where else?) Lake City, FL… and Valerie suggested we take the bug.  Well, why not?  It’s ills had been cured, so we’ll take it out for a small road trip.

The drive there was perfect, and as a precaution I did NOT go and fill the tank with gas!  When it came time to leave Lake City, the car started perfectly and drove us out of town without any kind of protest… for about the first ten minutes.  Then all hell broke loose.

It felt like we were running out of gas.  We’d be cruising along at 60 mph and the car would be coughing, bucking and shaking us up like one of James Bond’s martinis.  Yet it wouldn’t die when we came to a stop; it idled happily and peacefully.  Start down the road again, and the violent bucking would start anew.  We weren’t sure if we’d make it home or not.

Luckily, we did make it home.  And Valerie noticed that our fuel filter looked empty, and that just a little bit of fuel was squirting into it, but not enough to get through to the other side.  Fortunately I had ordered a new fuel pump, and after an “out with old and in with the new” dance, we were ready to roll again.  Then the old carburetor came back in the mail, and I happily took the Chinese knock-off out and put the old German one back in.

At the same time we figured out that the heads on this VW engine are Mexican made (as is the whole engine), and that in latter years the heads were reengineered to have a ¾” spark plug hole instead of a ½” hole.  So I replaced the spark plugs that were in the engine as they were the “standard” size for this year and model and replaced them with the slightly longer plug and – viola – we have a car that is running nicely once again.

As confidence is slowly being restored, we’re again getting excited about making this trip, rather than pushing the car over a cliff.  Sadly (or fortunately for the VW), in Florida cliffs are very hard to find!

Hindsight is 20/20… and so is the New Year!

Our 1973 Standard Beetle, which has been "telling us"
that it wants to go on a cross-country adventure.

2020 has arrived, and with it comes the anticipation of a road trip from the east coast to the west coast and back again… barring any major breakdowns.  The routes haven’t been selected as of this writing, but the basic plan is clear: take the backroads, go slow and see parts of America that have been forgotten and put on the back burner with the advent of the Interstate Highway System.

Why the slow pace?  We plan on using our 1973 VW Beetle to make this crossing – and it just doesn’t cruise “happy” at the speeds most Interstate Highways demand.  60mph seems to be it’s “happy speed” – and that would get us run over by most of today’s freeway crowd.  So it’s off to find the old US and State Highway systems, small towns and slower pace of making such a crossing.

We’ll be taking the tandem with us, broken down and packed in its case which just barely fits into the roof rack pictured in this article’s photo.  We have wanted to do “something” different in the vacation arena, and traveling slowly just sounds like something we want to attempt – while we still can.  People used to drive these little cars across the nation, and we are feeling both a wave of nostalgia and a harkening back to a simpler time by attempting to do the same. 

I’m hoping to add entries to this blog to chronicle the drive; if you see nothing until next year it means that the plans fell through.  Otherwise stay tuned… we hope to head west while the weather is still cool enough not to kill our air-cooled engine, yet warm enough to enjoy a little cycling at our major layovers. 

Here’s to the New Year – both yours and ours!

The Blog With No Heartbeat

As of 2019 we're still riding as often as possible.
Living in Florida gives us year-round cycling opportunities.

This blog has been left unattended for several years.  I had started a new one to support a possible cross-country bike ride; that dream has pretty much been scrapped.  Many month back I shut down the other blog, and transferred the writings over to this site.

A few days ago I took a look at the blog and discovered that, much to my disappointment, all the text had indeed transferred over wonderfully; all the photos, however, did not. I spent most of yesterday trying to match the photos to the captions (that still remained) and reinstate the “visual aids”.  I was able to find all but one… so the time spent was fairly successful.

I should state that I’d still like to make the ride.  I had also hoped to raise money to buy a trailer to use as a “mobile base” daily, rather than camp or have to go the motel route every night.  At the end of this ride I wanted to make the trailer available to other people who wanted to make the same crossing (people of advanced age, with health issues or special needs, where camping out isn’t an option). The trailer would be used primarily along the “Southern Tier” route, which runs from San Diego, CA to St. Augustine, FL running back and forth across the land with a new group of cyclists each time.

It became apparent that there was little interest in this idea; presumably people desiring to make this crossing had either the means or the equipment.  Then came the talks of how to insure such a vehicle, and who would ultimately be held responsible in the event of an accident while the trailer was in tow.  It was easy to let go of an idea that didn’t really interest people and was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

So now what?  Time will tell if I give this blog a little new life… or whether it’s just left to flatline.  One thing is just as certain now as it was when this blog was created: there is no theme.  So if you’re looking for something with consistency… look elsewhere, brother!  

Waiting For the Storm to Pass

Taking a break alongside the Suwannee River.

Hurricane Matthew is currently traveling northward along the east coast of Florida as I write this; we expect to go through this storm with winds around 30 mph and rain, but nothing nearly as severe as what is predicted to hit the coast.  The one thing I will guarantee in all this:  we will not be riding the tandem today!

This gives me the opportunity to sit down and type out “h-e-l-l-o” to those who enjoy reading something that’s totally unrelated to the election coming up in a month from now.  Yes, tomorrow the bike stays in the garage.  Why?  Because I’m a “fair-weather biker”!  (That’s why I moved to Florida.)

The riding that we’ve accomplished since we arrived has been exceptional.  We’ve learned several routes within Levy County (in which the town of Williston is located), and we’ve also ventured out into adjoining counties on our daily loops.  Generally speaking we ride almost every single day, and we usually pedal between 35 and 50 miles on each outing.

We bought our current tandem back in 2009.  Up through May of this year we clicked off around 15,000 miles.  Not bad considering we had full-time jobs then.  In the almost five months since we’ve been here, we’ve cycled 3370.3 miles.  At this rate, in one year’s time we will put on almost half of the total miles that this bike had traveled before moving to Florida.  That’s not bad for a couple of almost sixty year olds!

Another interesting side-note is that, while we haven’t fulfilled our dream of pedaling across America, we have ridden more than enough miles to do so since we arrived in the Sunshine State.  The mileage from San Diego, CA to St. Augustine, FL is about 3053.5 miles.  Now we know that given enough time, we can ride the distance; we just need to stop riding in circles at some point and start riding in a straight line!

The beauty of the area we live in is exceptional.  Many miles of horse farms and pastures, forests of pine and hammocks of old-growth oak trees surround us.  The rural flavor of this region is delightful, and yet the “big city” (and all of its services) is twenty miles away.  The little town we live in has a major-name grocery store a little over a mile from where we live, a take-out Chinese restaurant for those “I don’t feel like cooking” evenings as well as a couple of major fast food eateries, and a local restaurant that puts “southern cooking” at a new level.

North-central Florida is notthe picture-postcard image most people conjure up in their minds when they think of “Florida”.  From our perspective it’s much better.  Truly, it’s a year-round cycling paradise!