Long live the Cool Bus!!!
Hell week continues. Things are actually progressing. The UPS guy was met with a mountain of outgoing boxes yesterday, but I still have more to pack.
While he was picking up a mound of boxes, I was in Lowell, MA clearing away "stuff" from around several vehicles in preparation for moving them. First to be dug out was the Mighty Dodge aka the Cool Bus.
The decision was made to junk it. The reality is that I can throw together a shed out of pallets and musket crates in the same amount of time it would take to make a round trip to Lowell to pick it up and tow it here. Then I would need to take the seat out of it and cover the missing floor sections with plywood or something. All during hell week. I thought it better to send it off to the great junkyard in the sky and have a little less "stuff" to do this week.
Found some neat momentos in it while clearing it out. I took the plate off of it and the junkyard dude came with a flatbed to haul it away. They should paint flatbeds up like hearses. That's kind of what they are, big diesel hearses for dead cars.
The Cool Bus deserved better. It was like an old faithful dog. 380,000 miles on it, and it would still go over 120MPH while towing a trailer. It was a 3/4 ton Dodge 8-passenger van that we got used after it had been sold off by an airport limo company who had to liquidate quickly before they were seized by the IRS.
First my Mom used if for daycare, fieldtrips etc. Then we moved with it when I bought my first house. Then it became the ultimate reenactor vehicle with the addition of a roof rack donated by Al A. who took it off of his old phone company surplus van. It was the kind of rack that had hooks on the front to make it easy to put a ladder on. It looked like the Mighty Dodge had antlers. We took off the rack because it wouldn't fit through the sallyport of the fort on Castle Island where we used to have an annual encampment.
Later on, when I worked at the bus company, people would hang out after work and get silly. One particulalry drunken night some coworkers thought it would be funny to decorate my (yellow) van with the words "Lowell" and "School Bus" in the big black letters that you see on the side of a bus. Of course, the "school bus" part was quite illegal, so we changed it to "Cool Bus" the next day.
Eventually I stopped getting inpection stickers for it, kind of a protest thing about it being none of the state's business what I drove. In four or more years of driving without a sticker, we only got pulled over once. It was covered in bumper stickers like "If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?" and "It take lead balls to shoot a muzzleloader (complete with Rick Howe's portrait)", stickers from the Seige of #4, various Libertarian and Indian themed stickers too, including "Official MicMac Truck".
I think the cop just wanted to hassle the hippies after having a bad day. The other cop who was on the scene seemed a bit embarrased to be a part of giving us a ticket, it was Wendy and I and 4 week old Caleigh. There were no mechanical defects, it was obvious that the old fart cop just wanted to give us a hard time because we didn't look the way he wanted. It was in the town of Tewksbury, MA. I never did get a sticker after that, but even in other vehicles I never spent a dime more in Tewksbury.
I've gotten several speeding tickets with it, but that was the only time anyone noticed the sticker.
One speeding ticket was in New York. We (me, Al and Eric) were coming back from the "Clan Wars" Jacobite event in Milford, NY. It had snowed a little that weekend. We were wearing kilts, bonnets, dirks etc. We were dirty. We smelled bad. In the back was Benjamin, the 3-prd cannon on a field carriage, a mortar, a grenade launcher, baskethilts, probably five or six muskets, assorted pistols, a powder box, targes lining the windows like something out of a futuristic Viking movie, but the funniest item was a foam head (really good one) on a pike that just happened to be wearing a Hillary Clinton mask.
We had been stuck behind an old guy doing 40MPH in a single lane part of the highway for a little too long, and when the road opened up, I punched the accelerator. The week before I had put new injectors into it, and it really sprung to life. I hadn't got up to cruising speed yet when the State Police Z-28 pulled me over, I had only climed up to 87MPH. The cop looked at the stickers as he approached the van, took a long gaze into the back at all of the weaponry, lingered a second to study the Hillary head on a stick, and gave me the ticket almost without a word, like he was trying to make believe he hadn't seen a thing out of the ordinary. A $125 ticket, but a priceless moment.
One time, I backed it out of my driveway in a hurry an slammed a fire hydrant shaped hole in the back of it. When we had it fixed, they weren't able to match the paint so it ended up two-tone yellow with a pinstripe between the shades of yellow. It looked long, and vaguely like a ripening banana.
I stopped driving it when the floor started to rot. You know how it goes, you park it meaning to fix it when you have a few minutes, but you never really do and it just rots away. You can't bring yourself to junk it, but eventually you have to face facts and have it hauled away.
Wendy and I lived in the van for two weeks on our honeymoon. We had posted our "banns" at Fort #4, then drove off to Lousibourg out on the tip of Nova Scotia. A 2500 mile round trip, all in all. We had built a bed frame in the back and had a twin sized bed back there, taped screening over the windows from the inside to keep the bugs out, and camped in it along the way. At one point it broke down and we camped in it at the Dodge dealer in New Glasgow, NS. It took a day for them to troubleshoot the wiring harness, then we were on our way again.
The junk yard is mailing me a check for $35. Somebody will get a great V-8, transmision and rear end. Brand new windshield too. Sort of like donating organs, little bits of the Mighty Dodge will live on.
Long live the Cool Bus!!!!
While he was picking up a mound of boxes, I was in Lowell, MA clearing away "stuff" from around several vehicles in preparation for moving them. First to be dug out was the Mighty Dodge aka the Cool Bus.
The decision was made to junk it. The reality is that I can throw together a shed out of pallets and musket crates in the same amount of time it would take to make a round trip to Lowell to pick it up and tow it here. Then I would need to take the seat out of it and cover the missing floor sections with plywood or something. All during hell week. I thought it better to send it off to the great junkyard in the sky and have a little less "stuff" to do this week.
Found some neat momentos in it while clearing it out. I took the plate off of it and the junkyard dude came with a flatbed to haul it away. They should paint flatbeds up like hearses. That's kind of what they are, big diesel hearses for dead cars.
The Cool Bus deserved better. It was like an old faithful dog. 380,000 miles on it, and it would still go over 120MPH while towing a trailer. It was a 3/4 ton Dodge 8-passenger van that we got used after it had been sold off by an airport limo company who had to liquidate quickly before they were seized by the IRS.
First my Mom used if for daycare, fieldtrips etc. Then we moved with it when I bought my first house. Then it became the ultimate reenactor vehicle with the addition of a roof rack donated by Al A. who took it off of his old phone company surplus van. It was the kind of rack that had hooks on the front to make it easy to put a ladder on. It looked like the Mighty Dodge had antlers. We took off the rack because it wouldn't fit through the sallyport of the fort on Castle Island where we used to have an annual encampment.
Later on, when I worked at the bus company, people would hang out after work and get silly. One particulalry drunken night some coworkers thought it would be funny to decorate my (yellow) van with the words "Lowell" and "School Bus" in the big black letters that you see on the side of a bus. Of course, the "school bus" part was quite illegal, so we changed it to "Cool Bus" the next day.
Eventually I stopped getting inpection stickers for it, kind of a protest thing about it being none of the state's business what I drove. In four or more years of driving without a sticker, we only got pulled over once. It was covered in bumper stickers like "If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?" and "It take lead balls to shoot a muzzleloader (complete with Rick Howe's portrait)", stickers from the Seige of #4, various Libertarian and Indian themed stickers too, including "Official MicMac Truck".
I think the cop just wanted to hassle the hippies after having a bad day. The other cop who was on the scene seemed a bit embarrased to be a part of giving us a ticket, it was Wendy and I and 4 week old Caleigh. There were no mechanical defects, it was obvious that the old fart cop just wanted to give us a hard time because we didn't look the way he wanted. It was in the town of Tewksbury, MA. I never did get a sticker after that, but even in other vehicles I never spent a dime more in Tewksbury.
I've gotten several speeding tickets with it, but that was the only time anyone noticed the sticker.
One speeding ticket was in New York. We (me, Al and Eric) were coming back from the "Clan Wars" Jacobite event in Milford, NY. It had snowed a little that weekend. We were wearing kilts, bonnets, dirks etc. We were dirty. We smelled bad. In the back was Benjamin, the 3-prd cannon on a field carriage, a mortar, a grenade launcher, baskethilts, probably five or six muskets, assorted pistols, a powder box, targes lining the windows like something out of a futuristic Viking movie, but the funniest item was a foam head (really good one) on a pike that just happened to be wearing a Hillary Clinton mask.
We had been stuck behind an old guy doing 40MPH in a single lane part of the highway for a little too long, and when the road opened up, I punched the accelerator. The week before I had put new injectors into it, and it really sprung to life. I hadn't got up to cruising speed yet when the State Police Z-28 pulled me over, I had only climed up to 87MPH. The cop looked at the stickers as he approached the van, took a long gaze into the back at all of the weaponry, lingered a second to study the Hillary head on a stick, and gave me the ticket almost without a word, like he was trying to make believe he hadn't seen a thing out of the ordinary. A $125 ticket, but a priceless moment.
One time, I backed it out of my driveway in a hurry an slammed a fire hydrant shaped hole in the back of it. When we had it fixed, they weren't able to match the paint so it ended up two-tone yellow with a pinstripe between the shades of yellow. It looked long, and vaguely like a ripening banana.
I stopped driving it when the floor started to rot. You know how it goes, you park it meaning to fix it when you have a few minutes, but you never really do and it just rots away. You can't bring yourself to junk it, but eventually you have to face facts and have it hauled away.
Wendy and I lived in the van for two weeks on our honeymoon. We had posted our "banns" at Fort #4, then drove off to Lousibourg out on the tip of Nova Scotia. A 2500 mile round trip, all in all. We had built a bed frame in the back and had a twin sized bed back there, taped screening over the windows from the inside to keep the bugs out, and camped in it along the way. At one point it broke down and we camped in it at the Dodge dealer in New Glasgow, NS. It took a day for them to troubleshoot the wiring harness, then we were on our way again.
The junk yard is mailing me a check for $35. Somebody will get a great V-8, transmision and rear end. Brand new windshield too. Sort of like donating organs, little bits of the Mighty Dodge will live on.
Long live the Cool Bus!!!!
posted by MVTCoPete | 12:09 AM
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