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Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 15:35:03 -0800
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Wow! Excellent report! Thanks, Fabian.
Just a few more points from the past that may still be relevant, taken from
my personal experience.
When my family moved from Massachusetts to Buelach, Switzerland in 1974, we
crossed the Atlantic on the very last sailing of the SS France and my dad
took the '68 VW Squareback with us, in the cargo hold. (tangent: The SS
France is the largest passenger ship in the world ... bigger than the QE2
.. and now sails in the Caribbean under the name SS Norway). I was in the
6th grade at the time.
Because of the fact that SS France staff went to strike, our car was held
hostage in the cargo hold for several months and we arranged to have a newly
wed couple whom we met on the ship to drive the car from Le Havre, France to
Switzerland. The thing they failed to do was to check the oil in the
engine. The car had been at sea for several months and the oil was low.
They blew the engine during their trip across France. So we got stuck with
a '68 VW Squareback with a blown engine. My dad had spent hours and hours
before leaving USA to fix the car body into tip-top shape. However, upon
arrival in Switzerland they determined that the repairs that had been done
with "bondo" on the car body was insufficient according to Swiss law in the
1970's and all bondo had to be removed and the work redone locally using
sheet metal. Needless to say, we incurred lots of costs and headaches.
Fabian's checklist would have been invaluable to us back then.
I think that one of the reasons we took the car was that cars in Switzerland
in the 1970's were very expensive. I wouldn't repeat the same thing ever
again ... at least not without Fabian's list! :-)
-chris
P.S. My dad had also hand-built a small gokart for my brother and I. It
ran on a lawnmover engine. I seem to remember that the gokart came along
with the VW in the trunk. The VW Squareback is like a station wagon.
Somehow we got the gokart into Switzerland too and used it in private
industrial parking lots during the weekends in Embrach. Wow ... what
memories. We eventually gave the gokart of a driving school instructor in
Buelach who used it for advertising and I have no idea what we did with the
VW before we moved back to Massachusetts in 1976.
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Received on Wed Feb 06 2002 - 05:01:46 PST
