And somewhere on the grounds of Mark's place is the carcass of my buddy Dick Howard's old bay bus with tons of stickers (mostly bike related) on it.� Now serving as a storage shed, I believe.� Mark helped him transplant the good engine and trans into a less rusted bay Westy.

Stephen

--- On Sat, 1/23/10, Joy Hecht <jhecht@ALUM.MIT.EDU> wrote:

From: Joy Hecht <jhecht@ALUM.MIT.EDU>
Subject: vanagon repair shops - which has the most character!
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Date: Saturday, January 23, 2010, 2:48 PM

Hi all,

I recently found myself in Roanoke Virginia, where two nice women drove up
alongside my van and handed me a slip of paper with the name of a repair
shop, saying "if you have any trouble with your van while you're here, come
visit us, we work on all kinds of VW vans."

Well, Matilda was having some slight incontinence problems (otherwise known
as dripping fluids), and I figured maybe I should have this looked at while
I was in town.� So I took her over to Salem Imports, Mark Dearing's repair
place in Salem, VA (next town over from Roanoke), and he replaced my water
pump.

But what struck me was the wonderful character of his shop!� Especially as
I'd had a dream, the night before going there, that it was clean and pretty,
with red-and-white checked curtains and a cleaning staff scrubbing the
bathrooms (plural).� Not!

I thought it would be fun to seek out the vanagon repair place with the best
character - Mark's is definitely a contender!� So do have a look at some
pix, and see if you can top this:
http://picasaweb.google.com/hecht.joy/VanagonRepairShopsSalemImportsSalemVA#

Joy