The Trip Five Go Mad in an Old V Dub

By Rick Pinn

It's the late sixties and five friends, all in their late teens or early twenties, set off on a trip to Greece. They have an old VW combi bus, some money and bags of enthusiasm. Their excitement is such that they start off going the wrong way. They end up going down to Spain, back around the French coast, across Italy, down the Yugoslavian coast and eventually into Greece. Then back through Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium. This is the light-hearted story of their adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rick Pinn
• Release date: Jul 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005739379

Book preview

From England to Greece (with a detour) and back – a trip that was never meant to be

Or! The adventures and misadventures of five baby boomers in an old VW!

Thank you Deirdre

For all your editing, suggestions and encouragements

And I did all the illustrations

So! No-one else to blame there either then

The Trip

Rick Pinn

Published by Richard Pinn at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Rick Pinn

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Dedicated to Gill and all my friends. And to remind our children and grandchildren that Dad/Granddad was also young once and got up to everything that he tells them not to do.

Warning contains male juvenile humour

WE’RE OFF – WRONG WAY!!

By the time we got to Bordeaux we were all knackered. We’d never intended to go there but we’d taken the wrong road out of Calais and had been so busy slagging off the other passengers, the French, and everyone else we could think of, and generally larking about and not concentrating, that we hadn’t registered we were heading in the wrong direction.

"Did you see that family on the boat?"

"What that great fat lot? There must have been about ten of them"

Yeah! How do you suppose she got pregnant in the first place?"

"Don’t be daft!"

"No! I just mean the old man must get very pissed a lot, a ten pinter or what"

"Mind you, he’s hardly Sacha Distel...? She must have been comatose"

"I don’t know how people do that every day"

What?

"Get up at 4.30 every morning, some people do Yeah! But they aren’t going to Greece are they?"

"No they have to go to bloody work"

"Work, what’s that? Hey, hey"

We were excited about having made it across the channel. After weeks of anticipation we were finally on our way for the adventure of our lifetimes.

We should have suspected something might be wrong when the scenery started to change – lush green to sparse and sun bleached vegetation. We were too far away from the sea or that might have given us a clue, but we probably wouldn’t have noticed that either. The country side on the other border of France would have been much greener, we were just too occupied to notice, watching sun- tanned girls in their short skirts on their motorised bikes (mobilettes?), hair blowing in the wind and smiling.

We started to realise something was wrong when the van started to feel more like a sauna. We hadn’t expected that kind of heat in the part of France we had intended to go through, and of course there was no air conditioning in anything but the most expensive cars – the VW certainly wasn’t that. We had planned to go to Strasbourg through Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, and down into Greece. We thought we’d have to spend a

Our first sight of the continent. Some of us had been to Europe before but only on school trips. This was the first time any of us had gone under our own steam. What a thrill!!! We could hardly contain ourselves.

Week on the journey and a month on some Greek beaches. It didn’t quite work out as we’d planned but it did become an adventure that none of us could have anticipated.

There were five of us in an old blue and white, left hand drive Volkswagon Combi, (the old girl, the V Dub bus or that bloody wagon, depending on how well she’s going) just a van really with windows, along with luggage, sleeping bags, clothes, tents and various other essentials such as enough new fangled ‘pot noodles’ for a couple of months away. Plus a couple of metal water carriers from an Army Surplus shop which we used for the water for washing, cleaning our teeth as well as making tea – we are English after all.

We had no seats in the back apart from the engine cover (which was where we stored the spare wheel) so we had brought along some old wooden kitchen chairs to sit on. This was way before seat belts and any other sort of safety feature were compulsory. She had no heating (not that we were to need it) and there was nothing in the way of creature comforts. We sat on chairs or laid on sleeping bags set against the walls or against the engine cover.

The old bus, stone chips on the bumper and all. She saw us through about 3 thousand miles and an awful!!! lot of adventures. We don’t know what happened to her, but we hope she wasn’t just trashed. She deserved so much more.

The longer journeys sapped all our resolve and it took all our enthusiasm to remain cheerful. John had bought the van from someone that he knew who imported used Volkswagen vans and combis from the Dutch police and post office and various other, mostly legal, places on the continent. So, they were always well maintained, but basic.

We each took turns with the driving and we each brought a very wide variety of styles, skills and definitions to the concept of safe driving. Concentration was the biggest problem, all of us talking at the same time, so much new to see, enormous distances and long straight roads. If it wasn’t for the ‘in-car entertainment’, which included the cassette player (I’ll come to that later), the boredom, the hunger and the heat might have got to us more often than it did. Just remembering which side of the road to drive on was more than enough for some of us.

"Remember, this is drive on the right and watch out for that BLOODY TRACTOR!!!" Didn’t you see the ‘prioriday a dwoit’ sign?

Before I go any further, I suppose I’d better introduce the participants of this epic.

So here we are...

SIMON, JOHN, COLIN, GERRY AND ME - RICK!

SIMON the Welsh working class, aspiring actor whose language is absolutely foul, so foul it’s hilarious and has to be heard to be believed. At five feet seven he is the smallest of us all, he is dark skinned (Spanish blood he supposes), dark haired, brown eyed and with the kind of face girls like to call ‘cheeky’. We had another word for it ‘lusty’. At the time Simon was a student at RADA and was the least ‘luvvy’ actor you can imagine. And one of the funniest people I’d ever met, still is – also a great dancer.

JOHN the embarrassed rich kid, whose car it is and the only one who speaks anything other than English. Tall, fair haired and very strong, he had been a junior judo champ. Although he wasn’t an actor like Simon, John knew his way around the London theatre scene having appeared naked running from the back of the Roundhouse to the stage as part of one of those ‘alternative theatricals’ following the success of Hair. (The roundhouse is an old engine house originally for a railway turntable, which was converted into a venue for alternative theatre and avant-garde music. It has since become a rather trendy spot for all sorts of events.) John had also been an assistant in a large, traditional Korean pottery for a couple of years in his mid-teens. (This would come in handy later in our trip.)

COLIN the trainee engineer from Battersea, who can fix anything mechanical (his skills would also come in very useful on the road). He was also tall, fair and well-built just like John, but with the kind of passion which could be wrongly interpreted as fierce. He had been a part-time underwear model, Y-fronts, he didn’t half suffer some teasing for that (no pictures still exist – I wonder why!!! – Shame). Colin was an apprentice at one of the engineering factories along the river