Donna & Otis
Model:
1978 Riviera Campmobile
Name:
Otis is my maiden name. I didn’t want to give up my maiden name anyway, so now I don’t have to.
Color:
Original orange
Mileage:
80,000+
Motors:
This is the second motor: a rebuilt air-cooled.
Owned since:
2020
Owners:
I’m the third owner. I bought it from a nurse, a mom of boys who loved surfing—she would take them to the Hampton Beach area in the summer.
Location:
New Hampshire
Favorite driving song:
“Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles.
I’m a practical person. I have a car for a purpose, like to get me places. I don’t have toy cars. I thought Volkswagens were cool, but I never really had the urge. My husband has a Studebaker that was his grandmother’s. So he has that toy. But it just never occurred to me to have more than one car.
Then Covid hit. My husband thought it was a good idea to get a Bus. My friends Trish and Don are Bus people in our town. They know people who want Buses and people who want to sell Buses. If anyone is going to sell a Bus, it’s Catamount Bus Stop (Trish and Don’s house). So we started putting our feelers out and eventually a woman brought her Bus to Don to sell. Don said it was solid. My husband liked it. So we bought Otis. My husband never drives it. He sits in the passenger seat, puts on his Jerry Garcia, and loves just being in it.
I learned to drive on a stick shift, so driving a Bus is not foreign to me, but it’s got the big steering wheel, which is not power steering, and you have to push down on the gear to get it into reverse. It kind of feels like you’re driving a boat.
My dad wanted me to have it fixed up, so he paid to have a new engine put in. I think he loved it because it made me smile and I was his baby. When you sit in a Bus, you have to smile. I would take him for rides in it, to the veterans home, nursing homes, and to visit his friends. He just knew that it was cool, and he loved me. I was having fun, and he just wanted to be with me.
Trish has brought me to all the adventures. We’ve gone to Jerry Jam, which is amazing, and I’m not a festival person. The people are great, but I’m not into three days of hanging out and doing what I consider nothing. I’m type A. I asked Trish, “When do people sleep at these festivals? Cuz I’ll need my rest.” I like to have an eight-hour night’s sleep. I’m not a big partier. I like my wine and stuff, but . . . Trish said, “Oh yeah, you sleep.” She was so wrong. I tried to go to bed at the Jerry Jam, and it was rocking and rolling. I think the music never stopped. It was on all night. It was like Woodstock. I put my earplugs in, I had a fan going, and I tucked myself in my little pop-top bed. In this particular model, the top goes straight up. It doesn’t go up at an angle like the other Westfalias. I like to sleep in the pop-top because you feel like you’re away from everything else. It’s tent-size with zippers that open, and the air blows through.
I just hate putting her away for the winter. (Otis is a girl, by the way.) But then in the spring, there is the dust-off. You get your Bus out, and everyone dusts them off. We caravan up to Fort Foster, Maine, right on the ocean, and have picnics. I love that. It’s one day. Over three hundred Buses. I like being part of the “skittles,” one of many in the pack. There’s people from every walk of life at these festivals: there’s engineers, doctors, lawyers . . .
My dad was still living when I bought Otis, and he loved it too. It reminded him of when he was younger. He worked for a bank when I was a kid, and he would repossess vehicles and often bring them home. He brought home several Beetles. I guess he ended up buying them, because we had an orange one, a yellow one, and a blue one. We had them until they didn’t work anymore. My dad wasn’t a mechanic or anything, so if it was really broken, a new one would show up.
When I was nineteen, driving one of the Beetles on the highway, the whole wheel came off the axle. I looked in the rearview mirror, and it was like in a movie, the wheel rolling away. Then the axle slammed down and started dragging into the road and I pulled over. We put the cotter pin back in and drove away. I think that was the blue one.
Coming back from a festival with Trish last summer, we were coming through Franconia Notch, which is a notch through granite in the mountains. When it gets windy, your car can get blown all over. It was so windy. I was so scared. I was by myself. I was in a line of Buses with people I knew, but I was driving by myself. I thought I was going to blow over. I really did. I mean, I knew in my mind it probably wouldn’t, but I thought I was going to.
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I love parading with a bunch of Volkswagens. That’s the best part. I put her in Harvest Festival. It’s an orange Bus—it’s Harvest Festival. They go together. Matthew, a local man, loves my Bus, and it doesn’t matter where I am, if there’s an event in town and I’m there, he seeks me out. So he rode with me in the parade, and he was just beside himself. He tells everybody “I rode in that Bus!”​
What I love about the Bus is it makes people smile. If I never traveled to another festival again, that wouldn’t bother me. But if I couldn’t drive around and make people smile in normal everyday life, like going to the grocery store, to the gas station, going to wherever—it’s just a fun way to go.
