NaBloPoMo 2020 The First Time I drove Aunt Holly's VW Station Wagon

 

Outside our house, circa 1988

This photo was carbon cannondale dated by my pop. If you look close, there's a bike leaning up against a bush. Scrutiny revealed that the bike is his Cannondale touring bike. He got it after he crashed his earlier bike in 1985. So this photo transpired after 1985 but before my brother totaled the Toyota pick-up, which you can see extant over there on the left. So this was taken probably on or about 1988.

The car on the right is my mom's Aunt Holly's 1969 VW Station Wagon. When we first got it, and I'm not exactly sure how our family ended it up with it, but when we first got it, the car was that classic VW Bug robin's egg blue color. My mother called it "The Tank" because it weighed more than a school bus.

Here's the Tank when it was still in Aunt Holly's
garage ... which apparently doubled as a
great place to make ice cream.

Soon thereafter, somehow, it was repainted "BMW Orange." I vaguely remember something about how the local VoTech needed practice cars to paint and this car got volunteered. 

And so we had a 1969 manual-transmission VW Tank in a glorious shade of fluorescent orange. 

I have a stark recollection, one of those super vivid recollections, of driving that car. I'd come home from college and maybe had never driven it before or it had been awhile. It had that "VW in the rain" smell in the interior. 

I fired her up, threw it in first and headed out toward the highway. As I approached the intersection WITH THE HIGHWAY I stepped on the brake. And the pedal flopped onto the floor. Just kind of dropped with very little fanfare. Because THE CAR HAD NO BRAKES.

forchrissakes you'd think someone would have mentioned this.

Anyway, as luck would have it, I grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country where lots of cars had no brakes. Or half a floor. Or very few windows. All the farmers had non-street-legal 1972 Dodge Darts somewhere out on a field and so this was not my first day at the rodeo.

I yanked up the emergency brake.

But it was still traumatizing, that first time. Didn't take a super long time to get used to braking with the emergency brake though. Just like the rest of my family were apparently doing.