I had just gotten my bus running a month or so ago and had worked out most of the bugs and stuff when I realized that I had half a day's work on friday and I could go camping with my wife and three month old child in our bus for the first time. So I called up a friend of mine who had just bought a bus and was itching to go camping also, and then I called up our neighbors and we all decided that friday was going to be good day for camping. The only thing we couldn't decide on was where. Friday morning came and we still hadn't found a place that was a ways from civilization where we wouldn't be bothered, had a body of water very close, and someplace we could get to in our busses. I mentioned to a co-worker my predicament and he said, "Hell! Ah gotta great place for ya'll! 'Bout two mile from ma' house is some great trails that lead 'ya to this purty lake. Ain't nobody gonna bother ya none." (Now before I go on, I want to tell you that I live in the South- Chattanooga Tennessee, to be exact. I use the term "redneck" in a loving manner, finding some of those characteristics in myself after living here for about 6 years.) So after he tells me this, I tell him that we have two Volkswagen Busses, and as much as I enjoy 4-wheeling, our busses can't take too much (or so I thought). He assured me "Hell! Ah seen em drivin' cars back thair. Yur busses will be right fine." So it was a done deal.

We packed up two busses- My son, my wife and myself in mine (a '74 Westy with a perfect interior but rusty body) and four of our friends in another bus (a strong '73 westy). Sand Mountain, Georgia was our destination. We arrived at the bottom of the mountain and I called my friend for further directions. Up the mountain we went, with a long line of impatient cars following us. We were looking for (and I kid you not) "Scratch Ankle Road", and our instructions were to go until the road ended and wait at the guard rail for my friend to arrive. The landscape kept getting more and more uncivilized, with a trailer or small log cabin every couple hundred feet or so apart. There were ATCs and trucks with large tires covered in mud parked in about every yard. Here and there we saw a few Baja Bugs, a Meyers Manx and a some Rail Buggies. Well, there at the end of "Scratch Ankle Road", next to the guardrail was my friend, waiting for us in a four wheel drive vehicle. My wife looked at his truck, looked at me, looked at the trail we were about to turn onto and said, "I don't know about this, Joel." I assured her that the man leading us back told me that he had seen cars driving down these trails, and that we would have no problem at all.

He walked up to my bus and asked me if we were ready. I said, "Hell yeah!" (not really) and he jumped back in his truck and yelled, "Just follow me and stay out of the puddles. They are pretty deep!" So off he went down the trail at about 20 miles an hour. I tried to follow him, but with a three month old little boy in the back, the bumps were getting to be a bit too much (I was also tired of hitting my head on the ceiling). So I slowed up and thought to myself, "this isn't so bad". Well, every minute more we drove, the holes seemed to be getting deeper, and the rocks seemed to be getting bigger. Well, at least we weren't traveling uphill or through mud (yet). Our leader had zoomed on up ahead a while back and I was just doing the best I could when I looked up ahead and saw the trail, totally covered with water for about 30 feet. Oh boy. Good thing I didn't care about my paint, because I had to drive half in the woods to keep from getting too deep in the puddle. By this time my wife was muttering under her breath and trying to comfort our son (who was asleep- babies can sleep through anything). So the trail continues and so do we.

We've now been crawling along in first for about twenty minutes and I begin to wonder where exactly this guy is taking us. But I continue anyway. Then I see him in front of us, just getting back into his truck. I wondered what he was doing out of his truck, and I can't help but wonder if he wasn't locking his hubs (!) so he could have four wheel drive. Up in front of him I see the trail go straight uphill and the closer I get, the less smooth the trail looks. I see large stones, deep rivets and two rock shelves that need to be climbed to get up the hill. My wife looks up the hill and says, "No Way. Turn around right now." Well, we had come this far already and I figured that if we had trouble, our leader could pull us out with his truck, so I (never do this at home, kids) ignored my wife and started up the hill. And up the hill the old bus went. She was great! I couldn't believe it (what I really couldn't believe was that cars had come back here). The bus behind me made it up, too. I was loving this, but my wife was not. The trail stayed rutted and rocky the entire way to the campsite, and we even had to make our way through a small (12 foot) pit of mud that was about 7 or 8 inches deep.

By the time we passed through all that, my wife was on the edge of tears and begged me to turn around. Fortunately, I saw a lake up ahead and told her that we had arrived. Sure enough, at the next turn, there was our leader, waiting for us with a grin on his face. He took off and we set up camp. Our first warning should have been the hundreds of broken beer bottles that littered the ground, but we just picked them up and made sure we didn't drive over them. We had a lake and a great campsite, away from the broken bottles. We had tunes on the radio, beer in the coolers, and our wives making dinner over the fire- what could be better? As night dropped its silence around us, we gazed up at the stars and down at the fire. The trail in was forgotten and smiles were on every face, even my son's. The crackling of the fire, the buzzing of the mosquitos, the humming of the crickets, the...what's that sound? Sounds like... a very large mosquito. Sounds like a couple of them. No, sounds more like small engines... When around the bend shone four round headlights, bobbing and weaving, as the quad-runners attached to them zoomed up the trail towards us. Two men in full camouflage gear jumped off their machines and walked up to us, both with beer in their hands. We knew instantly what breed we were dealing with: Redneckasaurus. Possibly the most volatile kind: Mountain Redneckasaurus with alcohol, quad runners, and... what was that? Yes, it was. Guns. Sticking out of their belts. What could we do but offer them a seat next to the fire?

We were in a sticky situation- here we were, all of us had long hair and what with our busses, looked like we stepped out of the late 60's (although any self respecting bus owner would peg us for mid-seventies) and to top it all off, we were on their turf (we didn't have any guns either). Believe it or not, there was a connection, some strand of mutual ground to stand upon, that made us OK with them. One of them had, at one time, owned a Sand Rail. We were saved. I was the only one of the bunch who knew much about VWs, and with my working knowledge of "Redneckese", I did most of the translating between the two worlds. They were nice; they tried to scare my friend's wife by telling her that there were alligators in the lake we were camping next to, and she believed him, forgetting that we were about three miles above sea level, on the top of a mountain. All of a sudden, one of them (the one with the rebel flag waving from the back of his quad-runner) decided that we needed a larger fire. "Hell! That thar ain't no fire! Why, ah could piss that out! Har, Har, Har!" Lucky for us, he didn't try. What he did do though, was to begin piling logs on the fire. As the fire got bigger, the light began to spread, and his eyes landed upon our popcorn. He decided we were hungry and we needed popcorn, and seeing as how he had a gun and we didn't, we agreed that he was right.

Sure enough, as some of you may already know, popcorn and Bud Light just don't mix- that is, when the person trying to cook the popcorn over a bonfire has had too many Bud Lights. So there we are, smiling, wondering when these guys are going to go on their merry way and shoot squirrels or something, when we hear that same mechanical buzzing in the distance. This time, though, there were more than two (12 or 13 to be exact), and they had a large beacon calling them to its warmth and safety, our (bon)fire. They decide that this is as good a place as any to set up shop and begin working on their quad-runners that weren't up to snuff. Lucky for us, they all had guns too and they even had some coolers, strapped to the backs of their quad-runners, filled with enough Bud Light to satisfy a troop of marines.

All we needed now were some bears or something for them to shoot at. I think that they must have all been "Sons of the Confederacy" because they had more rebel flags than I had ever seen in one place before. I almost asked one of them for one for a souvenir, but decided not to. I didn't want to encourage any kind of conversation or make them feel more at home than they already did. There we sat, each of us silently praying that God spare us from these men, as nice as they were, and send them on their way. Right about the time I was silently saying "Amen", one of our "visitors" offered to liven up the "party" by throwing a 9mm bullet into the fire. Har Har Har! We were all quick to say "No thank you". Finally they fixed their quad-runners and decided that riding trails in the dark was more fun than hanging out with some leftover hippies who didn't talk much. And they left. But not before giving us their phone numbers so we could go camping with them when they went every summer. Boy what a trip that would be.

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief when we could no longer hear the annoying buzzing of their two and four-stroke engines. We gathered around the bonfire and laughed a bit, talked some, and thanked God for his mercies- No fights, no gunshot wounds, no bullets in the fire. Our only casualties were our two containers of popcorn that bravely sacrificed themselves to satisfy the redneckasaurus. Later that night they came back, but we had all just gone to bed, and once they realized that we were in bed, they acted like the polite southerners that they were and left us to our dreams. Morning found one of us fishing, and the rest of us sleeping. We cooked breakfast on our camp stoves and took our turns at casting a line or two to try our luck. While we were fishing, lo and behold, who did come riding up but our guests from the previous night. Hung over, but still southern gentlemen, and so we chit-chatted for a while about VWs again. They left us for good and we began packing up the busses, wondering about the drive out and whether or not we would have the good fortune that we had coming in.

My wife already knew what to expect, so she started out the trip out already worried, and she only got worse. My son, as usual, was asleep the entire time. Our biggest worry was finding our way out. There were lots of trails going off to the right and left and we had made a few rights and lefts on our way in. I thought I remembered the way, but when we came to one particular fork on the way out, I had the choice of making a hard right and plowing through about 12 feet or so of mud that I didn't know the depth of, or going straight. I didn't seem to remember the mud, and the general consensus was that there was no way we could even make it through there, so we went straight. Sure enough, it was the wrong way. Fortunately we came to the end of the trail after about five minutes of driving and so we turned back around. It was on this turn-around that I realized how top heavy Westies are, and I got real worried that we might roll over. I was kind of stuck in the position I was in until the bus behind me turned around, but he misunderstood that I wanted him to go faster and gave us all a good scare. I was so worried that we might tip that i told my wife and passenger not to move, and not to breathe if they could help it. We made it back on level ground without an incident, but we still had to make that sharp turn into the mud pit. I have no lift on my bus, and my rear tires are some cheap all season radial passenger car tire. The tread is OK for off the road driving, but I knew they had limitations.

I decided to go slowly through the mud so in case I hit something, we wouldn't all go flying, especially my son. First gear, RPMs high, off we go. The front tires sunk right in as soon as they hit the mud, but since the rear tires were on solid ground, the bus just plowed ahead. When the rear tires hit the mud, I had some forward momentum going, so we went for a few feet before the tires started spinning and the rear end of the bus started sliding around. We had just about come to a halt when the skinny rear tires sunk down deep enough to grab something and we started forward again. Out we came from the mud hole, none the worse for wear (except for my wife, of course- she was white as a sheet). The bus behind me had watched me as I almost didn't make it through the mud, so he really gunned the engine and tried to tear through the mud. Now he's got some fairly good sized tires on his bus- off road jobbies that give him about two or three inches more clearance than me. His tires were also wider, so I was anxious to see how he would fare. He took off like a shot (in a bus?) and he reminded me of those competitions where these guys in four wheel drive jeeps with huge engines and paddle tires go flying, floating down this huge pit of mud, and then sink in. Only the bus didn't sink in, it just flew across and came to a screeching halt right behind me. As he was flying over the mud, I watched his right rear tire shoot up into the air and them come back down. He must have hit something, but I was amazed at how well the independent rear suspension worked. The rest of the way out was nothing compared to that, and I even got a little crazy (in my own sort of way) and ventured through the water that I was told to stay out of. It only turned out to be a couple inches deep, nothing to worry about. My bus is now sitting in my garage, still muddy, waiting for our next adventure.

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