Old Pictures
These pictures are from way too long ago to be able to write up true trip reports, but we would still like to share them.
When we got married in 1994, our Baja Bug was our wedding car (our week long honeymoon was spent camping in B.C. with our Baja). Some of the wedding guests chose to make the car quite an interesting "package", the doors were tied shut with curling ribbon, among other decorations.
This picture is from our first off-road trip after we installed the old Bus rear end in the Baja. The maps didn't indicate that this was a "cows only" trail!!!! With the new rear suspension we were able, for the first time ever, to start up from a dead stop in a muddy puddle without some stuck-ness issues. Putting Bus reduction boxes in the back of a Baja makes for a very interesting creature, for a few more pics of the conversion, click here
For quite a while, this was one of our favourite camping spots. It is at the end of a deactivated road on Queest mountain, above Malakwa, B.C.
One July 17, we tried to make it to the lookout on top of Queest Mountain, a series of large snow banks blocked our way. We have since been to the lookout, but many of our attempts have been blocked by snow and landslides.
This picture is from 1995. This is a beautiful little spot near Spence's Bridge, B.C. The picture is crooked because the camera is propped up on a rock. When you camp in a Baja Bug, you don't pack a tripod! At that time, the Baja was our sole means of transportation. Our camping was so efficient that we could pack for two people for two weeks.
This picture does NOT do the scene justice. The Baja is perched at the top of a trail that goes straight down!
This was a spot just off of a highway in B.C., somewhere in the vicinity of Lilloet. We had pulled off of the road to wash up, as we had been eating fresh peaches & were covered in juice. As we stopped, the clutch cable broke. While we were unhooking the clutch cable, we discovered that the accelerator cable had about one thread left holding! So we changed both at the same time.
To anyone familiar with a Beetle, cable changes are a quick, easy job..... except when the guide tube through the tunnel for the clutch cable is broken! It took us hours of work to change those cables. We had to remove the cover plate located over the shift linkage under the back seat so that we could reach in with two fingers, grab the cable & guide it through the tube to the outside of the car. Managing to get the cable into your fingers is an interesting challenge.... one person twists the cable from the front, so that it comes up in the back, while the person in the back works on catching it. Not fun!!!! The accelerator cable change was the easy job it was expected to be.
If you look, you can also see our mountain bikes on top of the Baja. This was the only trip that we took our bikes with us, as it was too stressful off-road. At one point we found ourselves on a cross-country ski trail with overhanging tree branches hanging lower than the handlebars on our bikes. We eventually found the parking lot at the trailhead.... from the skiing side rather than the driving side! Fortunately, someone had already moved a concrete barrier out of the way & it was easy to get to the road from there.
After the hours long cable change we found this demonstration forest to camp in that night. It was a lovely spot, especially after dark when the bugs went to bed & the moon came out. We sat on the picnic table in the dark, washing the grease from the cable change out of Keith's hair.
This is the forestry campsite at Frog Falls. It is just a bit south of Three Valley Gap, B.C. This is one of our favourite little spots to camp. Just through the trees is the river, upstream a little bit is a tiny hydro-electric generating station.
In 1999, the Baja got "grumpy" (we didn't know what was wrong, but something told us not to drive him on the highway anymore), so that summer we took Giggles camping. We seem to have this thing about off-road driving, regardless of the vehicle. Do you suppose that roads like this could have contributed to the cracks in the deep sump that was on this engine at the time?!
These pictures are from our first camping trip in our '65 Bus in October of 1999. He'd only been on the road about a month, but we had to get out of town! Later, we built seats that convert to a bed in the back, but for this trip we had a tarp & a foamy on the floor. All of our camping gear was on top of our bed, including the bedroom stereo plugged into an inverter and the spare tire. That darned spare tire kept wanting to ride on top of the stereo!!!
This is a view of our bus & a beautiful valley from a fire lookout near Kaslo B.C. (Our bus is the only one wheel drive vehicle we've seen on top of this lookout!)
Our '65 bus was our daily driver for three years and our camping vehicle for some of that time. A VW bus is an amazingly capable vehicle, but we did push it a little far.
While backing down a very muddy hill that we couldn't make, we slid into this ditch. Unfortunately, we don't have a picture of the Bus IN this ditch on a cold, wet October day. You really can't see much, but there is a culvert in that muddy ditch. The Bus was at about a 40° angle in the ditch, spilling fuel until we got our Jack-All under the rear bumper to level it out a bit. We were too busy trying to get unstuck before dark to bother taking pictures.
There was a tree across an intersection that we hooked to with a length of doubled over 3/8" rope. With the come-along, we were able to gain a couple of feet at a time (rope stretch hindered us a lot), at which point we would block a wheel, tie another knot in the rope, and start again. We were about 3/4 of the way out by ourselves when a pick-up truck came along & pulled us the rest of the way out. We were very happy, as we would have gotten out by ourselves, but it would have been fully dark by then.
This incident is what really prompted the purchase of our UniMoG. We realized that if we were going to keep camping in inclement weather, we needed a bit more space to live in.