> this brings to mind a question:  how many of us are "hippies"?  i don't
> think of my syncro as a "hippie van", it's a 4wd brute that i use for
> hauling stuff on mountain trips.  but i also use it to camp at festivals
> and tailgate at red rocks.  i listen to a lot of hippie music (i was in
> high school in vermont at the beginning of the phish era) and vote
> green, but i work 9 - 5 and shop at the gap.
> 
> it seems like most vanagon owners are utilitarian german van
> enthusiasts, not dead-following, nader-voting vegans.  am i right?

I bet that at this point, what with all the rear-engined VWs being at
LEAST 14 years old and the traditional air-cooled ones now in their
third decade, most of the "impractical wild-eyed dreamer" type hippies
have been forced to move on to vehicles requiring less mechanical
vigilance and technical knowledge. It seems to me that the "original
hippes" contained a sizeable minority of folks who weren't just
outraged college potheads, but seriously competent self-sufficiency
types. I used to tag along with my friends to Dead shows back in the
early 90's (they were vendors, usually selling jewelry) and I'd say
that hardly 1 in 50 of those tie-dyed long hair folk I met were of the
"competent hippy" variety. Instead they seemed to be mostly just
itinerant beggars walking around holding a finger in the air.

Personally, I was forced into it by some bizarre inherited VW disorder
from my father (and him from his father before him). Being the first
US-born, non-German-speaking member of my immediate family line I
thought I could avoid it, but apparently all that did was delay the
inevitable.
-- 
John Bange
'90 Vanagon
"Keine Bange, wir holen die Zange!"