I suppose there is always a place to start with these blogs so maybe the best place is to start with a bit of my VW history so to speak.
My Journey almost started in Adelaide Australia with this Beetle. My wife had owned a Beetle in the 80’s and so she already had the bug, so to speak. This was being sold at a local garage and we came very close but never did buy this one so it was a near miss.
Later on back in the UK I was travelling in a work colleges MK4 Golf and just loved it, so I decided I had to have one.
That week I went out and bought my first MK4 Golf it was a Gold PD115 MK4. It was a great car although we had a few problems with it initially, blown turbo, and then needing new disc’s all round. I sold this car to my mother-in-law back maybe 9 years ago and she still has it to today.
Then we bought my wife a MK4 Golf this time it was a PD110. She had it for about 18 months and we never had a problem with it.
I had decide that I wanted to get a GT TDi PD130 and after much searching around I found this one.
I still have this Golf nearly 7 years later and I love it although it nearly met his maker last year but more on that in another post. This is one of the only VW’s that I have that has got its own name, meet “Nigel”
It was at about this point we decided that we didn’t like camping in tents anymore, so we started looking into the camper van scene and decided that we quite liked the idea. So we bought ourselves a VW T4 2.5 88bhp. This one went through quite alot of changes and I will post about that in another post. Buying this did mean we had to sell one of the now 2 golf’s we owned so the Green 110 was sold, my wife had Nigel and I had the T4 as a daily drive.
After owning the T4 for a while we thought we would like a bigger camper and friends of ours had just bought a VW Compass Navigator so we thought “Why not” and we bought a 2.4 Navigator that had a Turbo upgrade. Well the idea seemed great but in practice I didn’t like driving it and missed my original T4 so after owning it for less that 5 months we sold it.
The Navigator also pushed us into needing another daily drive that when we bought (yes you guessed it) another Golf MK4 this time it was a black 3 door GT TDi PD130 but it was so much quicker than Nigel that we think it must have been remapped. We kept this for about 18 months and now my daughters boyfriend owns it so it is still in the family.
Of course after selling the Navigator left us without a camper but this was soon rectified with the purchase of a beautiful blue 2.5 888 Special Long Nose T4. I was going to just outside London to look at another van when this one appeared online and I am so glad that we diverted and went to look at it. I will talk about this one in another post. The picture below is on the day we bought it.
It was around this time that Nigel failed his MOT and my wife had been wanting a Beetle for a very long time but we agreed as a daily drive she really needed to have a more reliable car this is when Vera arrived, a 2004 convertible Beetle, it was a compromise but she now loves Vera and she is very much part of the family.
So with Nigel off the road having failed his MOT I needed another car and decided on a MK5 Golf. I ended up with a GT TDi 140 DSG. It looked great it drove great but I didn’t really enjoy driving it.I think I kept it for about 9 months until I decided to sell it and bring Nigel back on the road.
To bring Nigel back on the road I needed to do quite a bit of work and it needed quite alot of time. I decided to buy a doner car. this car had many nice parts on it that have started moving over to Nigel. About a month ago I got a new MOT and the Golf has never looked better there is still much more work to do but I think we might be keeping this one for good now.
The doner car
Nigel Today
So this weekend I sold the Blue T4 to a lovely couple and I hope they have as much fun as we did. Whats next ? well I will be tacking delivery of a VW Crafter tomorrow and I start the conversion again.
