Archive for May, 2007

GreenGo

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Lights! Bumper! Greengo is ready for action! But not just yet, the outside will be done when I’ll come up with those pesky graphics (I’m working on them now), but the inside needs some more work.

Check out the window! It’s looking right into the closet, so I covered it with some stuff about us.

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GreenGo’s back!

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Back by popular demand……GreenGo!
Four coats of green and the tent up and proud.
Yeah, Yeah, we know the lights are missing and the bumper should in actuality be ON and not UNDER the bus… But isn’t the color pretty?

The insides are coming along too.

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It’s so GREEN!

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

The first coat is being rolled on, and to you I have but only one question: Do you like it, or do you LOVE IT?

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Bump-errrrrrr

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

So we took the bumper off and this is what happened:

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Feeling Groovy?

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Alright, alright, so we fell off the face of the earth for a month or two, no biggy. It’s just that we had a lot to do before the next step of our trip. We thought we’d be going to Africa next, but Shurik’s and my mother’s nagging has finally got through to me and we’ve decided to stay close to North America so I can apply for U.S. citizenship. In the interest of being close to the States when my interview comes along, we chose to go to Central America; and in the interest of shaking things up a bit, we’re going to do it in a “hippie” bus.

Do you like this idea? I’m not sure I do. No, no, of course, I like the insanity of it! It’s just that I can’t help but feel that having a permanent mode of transportation, which also doubles as our home, is a big commitment. What if it breaks? Gets stolen? What are the chances we’d have to flee from it when it catches fire in the middle of the road? And when it does, what will be the one thing I save?

Alright, so in order to drive through Mexico and Central America in an antique VW bus we actually need a… well, an antique VW bus. And not just any kind, Shurik wants the kind with the VW Bug engine. They used to make the “old” Bugs in Mexico until just a few years ago and every other car in there is a Bug (even some police cars), so maybe it would be easier to fix it there. The first car we decided to look at was in Hartford, CT. We were going to Boston anyway so we just stopped there on the way. Unfortunately the bus had a little problem, it’s been sitting around for so long in the harsh Northeast weather, that the axles have rusted shut and the wheels wouldn’t turn even with the generous (meaning free) help of a local mechanic who dragged the damned thing three feet and suggested the junk yard to be our next stop. Eh, no harm, no foul. Moving on.

Let me fast forward it for you a little: NYC –> Hartford, CT –> Boston, MA –> Montreal, Canada –> NYC –> Fort Lauderdale, FL where we stayed with Shurik’s family and after a few weeks of searching, few weeks of waiting, and few hundreds of miles later we finally got “Greengo” – our 1971 white VW camper bus which in Latin America is going to be a Gringo just like us. Ow, and the reasoning behind the peculiar spelling in the name comes from my plan to paint it Green and then only hope it will Go.

At the present time we are still working on the bus. We had a mechanic look it over and fix a few things so mechanically it’s more or less sound right now. But it too has been sitting neglected for sometime and has been heavily attacked by rust in some places to the extent that I now call it the Flintstone mobile. Its tent has rotted off too, so Shurik and his brother-in-law Boris, made a new one from a bargain-store camping tent. You’d think they’d give the easy sewing job to the girl, but there was nothing easy about it, plus I can’t sew to save my life anyway. At the moment, we gutted the insides completely; even the front seats are gone. Boris and Shurik are waging the war against rust! Never figured Shurik to be that thorough, but when the first thing you find in the car is a hornet’s nest, you might want to be. He found other creepy-crawlies too, but mostly just a lot of rust. We all have our little jobs now. Guys are painting rusty areas with the special paint and patching rust holes with fiberglass, and I was put in charge of stripping. No, I am not providing the much needed entertainment! I was stripping paint from the inside of the bus and had a lot of fun burning my skin off with the especially toxic stripper that managed to get everywhere. After a while, the guys weren’t even that surprised to hear me scream my head off and tried to get out of my way when I’d bolt for the cooling relief of the sink. After I was done, I was only too glad moving onto stripping paint from the furniture using a different less toxic stripper. Water based, it is much easier on my skin. Speaking of furniture, for such a small space it’s nice to see how every spare inch is utilized. The bus is smaller then most modern day SUVs, but inside you have a whole apartment. Besides the roof that opens up into a tent, giving you standing room and a cathedral ceiling of sorts, there’s an extra chair back to back to the driver seat with a storage box beneath it. The back seat folds down into a bed with a storage cabinted under it too. On the side of the bed, there is a small closet. There’s even a sink/”fridge” (more like a cooler) combo that we have already decided to remove in order to accommodate an occasional friend or just for extra wiggle room, but my favorite part is a folding table bringing fond memories of trains in the USSR (I love trains). But for some reason, one of the previous owners has painted all these white and now I’m keeping myself busy taking it off.