Just last week I was checking a friend's blog and found an ode to the family car that had finally bit the dust. I loved it!! Family members responded with memories of their own. It was so much fun! So, it got me thinking....how many memories do I have packed away that would be fun to relive with my family? I already did one about my wedding rolls but wanted to dedicate this one to a special friend. Many of you may remember the Bread Mobile but for those of you who don't I'll catch you up.
The Bread Mobile was the brown and tan Volkswagen van we had when I was a kid. We had so many adventures in it that it was so sad to see her go. Now, my memory has gone a bit foggy over the years (kids do that to ya) so I'm going to depend on my friends and family to fill in the blanks for me. ANYONE can leave a comment at the bottom. So, here are MY favorite memories (that I can remember) about the bread mobile!!
- Driving cross country around the US all summer long with 5 kids! My mom is amazing!
- When I pulled Jymn's two front teeth out playing tug of war (on one of these trips - he had his blanket in his teeth) and they flew to the front of the car & mom was yelling and swerved to the side of the road & a cop came up to make sure everything was okay & mom just kept yelling, "She pulled his teeth out!! I can't believe she pulled his teeth out! They weren't even loose!"
- Sitting in the very back between the back seat and the suitcases watching the fields go by & looking for windmills.
- Singing on all those long trips and each of us taking a part to make up (Jymn usually had the beat!)
- When the carrier on top got stuck when we tried to go into that parking garage.
- Sitting in the back looking out the back window singing, "Hurry, hurry, the police is comin'"
- Getting all the trucks & cars to honk for us on those long trips.
- Jumping out at gas stations, church, (anywhere the car stopped), to push it so mom could pop the clutch! I remember the look on people's faces as the 5 of us would pile out, line our little hands up on the back, push with all our might, & then run and jump in as mom pulled away.
- The time mom popped the clutch going BACKWARDS UP A HILL while an intoxicated homeless man & I pushed!
- All those years of delivering paper routes with a van full (about half way up) of papers & all us kids sliding around on them in the back trying to pass mom papers so she could throw them out the window.
- When Jason threw up all over the plastic covered papers in the back!!
- When Reed fell out of the side door of the van throwing a paper into someone's yard.
- How no one could drive it but mom....and the bishop, who we eventually gave the van to.
- How she had A/C!!
- Her crooked pinstripe.
- How excited and sad I was when I found her at the VW junkyard in Fayetteville. If I could have saved her I would have.
- How she looked just like a loaf of bread - thus The Bread Mobile.
- When mom, at one point, told us we could get her painted any way that we wanted. What ever happened to us doing that??
- The dents on the front of the roof from when mom climbed up on it to get my wind up bird toy off of the school roof!
- The time mom took us through the car wash, only to find out that all of the windows leaked!! I remember everyone screaming and trying to hold up blankets & anything we could find to plug the holes. Water was shooting through the holes like in the cartoons when little holes break through a dam. It was hilarious!!
- The time the mouse for Bubba (my ball python) got loose in the van and was lost for days!
- Hanging one of the boys Sunday pants out the window so they would finish drying...didn't they blow away?
Okay, everyone! Now it's your turn! Tell me what you loved & remember about our precious Bread Mobile! I look forward to remembering with you!
OK, PEEPS! If you've got this far then you have to READ THE COMMENTS!! Some are even better than what I posted here!!
18 comments:
First of all, thanks for doing this Christy.
- Yes it was great to have A/C. However it was only in this car that the A/C unit would knock you out when walking from the front to the rear of the car due to the lower spot hanging down between the front and middle seats.
- Wasn't there a "system" to closing the side door? "Lift and Slide, now push in on the back ... nope, try again."
- Who has a stick-shift minivan anyway?
- Of my two teeth, we only ever found one.
- "Hi, Hello, and How do you do!" repeat.
- Why did we have enough "stuff" in the car to block all of the leaking water?
- The engine was in the back!
Was it the bread mobile or the blue van that we had when mom lost the registration & we went through a traffic stop on post. They held us and made us look for it. (One of the boys was asleep in the back up against the door & they woke him up with their flashlights. They held us so long that mom finally "jokingly" told me and my friend (Shannon? or Kim?) to go smile at the soldiers to see if they'd let us go. It worked.
I remember that vehicle -- but, sadly, no vivid memories other than the Edwards' crusing around in it. Fun post!
I'm not sure I remember the bread mobile! I keep thinking of you guys in a blue van? But it seems like the blue van had a lot "character" too didn't it?! The van I remember but can't quite remember the outside, I seem to remember a trick to closing the sliding door...so maybe that WAS the Bread Mobile.
Reed (my brother?) fell out the window while throwing a newspaper?! Awesome!
The reason the Bishop and I were the only ones who could drive it was because in later years the gas pedal stuck and you had to slip your foot under it and pull it back up to slow down before you hit the break. We referred to it as "Cruise Control." Now you know why I drove barefoot!
Remember when a bottle of apple juice that had long before apparently rolled out of the grocery bag and become wedged under a seat...exploded in the car! We missed the explosion but the very fermented juice (fermented enough to break the bottle from the pressure) was everywhere! I took the Bread Mobile to a do-it-yourself car wash and sprayed out the whole interior.
How about our trip to Maryland when the car was older and the heater just didn't? You guys took turns curling up on the floor of the front passenger seat where there was a little bit of heat coming out. That was the last cold-weather trip we took in the Bread Mobile. I loved the van...but I love my children more!
(And don't bring up that hot chocolate story again...you guys all remember it wrong!)
By the way...I have laughed at so many of these. I bet it's making some people wonder about us though...
The hot chocolate story? Is that one of the million times you tried to wait until we were all asleep so you could slip into a gas station and buy yourself a treat to "help keep you awake"? I seem to remember you coming back to awake children who felt a little upset that you wouldn't go get all of them some!
And speaking of keeping you awake, I remember sitting in the front seat on Keep Mom Awake Duty singing La la LALA la all off key and loudly because it worked. I also remember trying to make you laugh so your one armed sunglasses would fall off.
HAHAHAH! I was TOTALLY going to bring up the hot chocolate story!!! Oh man...that is SOO funny. Okay I ALSO remember the "tint" falling off all the old windows and the "smiley face man" that Adam? (pretty sure) drew on the back window in TAR and could not be removed. EVERYone knew that van was ours. You couldn't miss it on the road. Of course the paper route held many a memory in the van. Riding on top the sea of folded papers and trying desperately to get them to mom fast enough (easy at first but not so much when you got down to the bottom of the barrel....) I remember once being so STRESSED at not getting the papers to her fast enough and running out that I just handed her my ARM and she (not looking--just reaching for papers) grabbed it and tried to throw me out the window!! I learned to keep my appendages to myself...she throws those papers HARD!! (love ya mom) :)
Oh My GOSH!! This picture just took me WAY back!! I totally remember your Bread Mobile! That thing was SUPER styling! ;) Ah, the days when all of you guys slept over our house and vise versa. Do you remember that? Too fun!
What an awesomely hilarious post and comments!!!
Adam told me that the main thing he remembered (besides what we've already posted) was that trip to Maryland with no heat and how we took turns curled up either in front of the passenger seat or in the back over the engine.
OK, there were other nice memories in that van, too. Like the evening we arrived in the Salt Lake Valley driving South on I-15 out of Wyoming. I remember how impressed we were with the Valley and glad we were to be there. I also remember the tinting on the windows made it virtually impossible to see much through them that evening.
The reason the Ac knocked everybody out was it was put in after we bought the car. The original AC was not good enough for NC Summers so we paid over $1000 to have the add-on unit put in. $1000 back in those days was a fortune but it paid off over the years. Nothing too good for my children.
Dad is right, there were good memories in it too.
- Who else has a car with a cool nickname that other people use when referring to it?
- Those years delivering news papers brought us closer together! (and I'm not only referring to when we slid around in the back and nearly knocked each other out after colliding together in the middle after some time-saving gnarly u-turn by Mom) :^)
- Not all cars were long enough to tape "Happy Birthday" banners to them!
- It's fun to hear the memories and info from Dad! I didn't know all the details about the AC, I enjoyed hearing about that!
"One of the boys was asleep in the back up against the door & they woke him up with their flashlights".
Oh My Gosh!!!! This is the answer!!!!! It's been over a 20 year search!! Seriously!
I have had a memory of laying in a car during a check point, however my memory of the event is quite different. I even asked Mom a few times a couple of years ago about where my memory of a check point came from and she denied anything of the sort ever happened! Of course the memory was a little different from my point of view.
I have a memory of driving through a check point. Because I had no idea when that could have ever happened, I believed it was on the border between East and West Germany. I remember people looking in the windows at night with lights and one of my parents telling me to lay down and act like I'm sleeping! I'm serious! I thought I was being smuggled in! Maybe not at the time, but because of this memory, over the years that is what I remember.
Thank you Christy for confirming that our parents were nice, honest, law abiding citizens. It's also nice to know that I'm not crazy and the memory wasn't a dream. I can now move on.
Where'd it go you ask?...Our Bishop had just lost his job and had to give up the Ehrisman-type van he bought to be able to take lots of people to the Temple in DC. Your Dad had sent some $ from Germany for a downpayment on a better car (did we call it the Smurf Mobile?-it was blue). That's when I offered him the Bread Mobile as they had no transportation at all. A few years later Christy spotted it in the yard of a repair shop looking like it was not going to be revived. We spent a few minutes with it, wished it well and moved on with life...which can be hard with it's an old friend like the Bread Mobile. (I feel almost like we should have a moment of silence now.)
We got it from a dealer in Monroe, NC, when we traded the Chevy Citation for it. The salesman met us a week later at a McDonald's in Rockingham to deliver it to us. The dealer put a state-of-the-art CB radio in it that was tied into the radio. Not sure when that stopped working; probably in Utah sometime. I put the tinting on the windows myself at the house on Van Buren in Fayetteville (one of the only do-it-yourself projects I ever did that didn't fall apart right away). It served us well on the trip to Utah and back. My memories of it fade where y'alls memories begin. It looked REAL GOOD when it was waxed (even on the top). I thought I dented the top when I was up there washing and waxing it but Mom using it for a ladder probably didn't help much either.
Ha! I remember the CB! "Break 1-9 calling for information...." I'd totally forgotten about that. And I remember waiting at the McDonald's for it & watching you put tint on the windows.
Yeah, I got to be quite the expert with tinting after that. I did the sliding dining room doors at my parents' house in Monroe. We did spend a lot of time on the CB in those days, too. New toy, I guess. I remember the antennae got broken off somewhere but can't remember where.
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