GhiaTwins

Part 1

In February of 1992 my cherished '67 sunroof Bug was stolen from my driveway. But, this dastardly deed turned out to be the beginning of my T34 adventure. Mary and I decided, after a little discussion that we wanted to look for either a Karmann Ghia or a Porsche 914. So I took a trip down to the local library and went through every newspaper in Northern California -- from Sacramento & Stockton, the entire Bay Area, and on down to Santa Cruz. I came home with a pretty good list and started calling people to arrange to see their cars on the upcoming Saturday.

We started early by driving up to San Carlos to see, I think, a '69 Ghia. That looked like a good possibility but we continued on up to South San Francisco to look at a couple Porsches and then over to the East Bay to look at another car. By mid afternoon we had made our way back down to the San Jose area and looked at a '67 Ghia in Los Gatos that also seemed like a possibility. Finally, we pushed over the mountain to look at one last car just south of Santa Cruz. To our surprise the car turned out to be different from anything else we had seen. I had seen one once before but not knowing Volkswagens at the time I had assumed it had to be a different year that what I was familiar with.

This strange car turned out to be a '66 Type 3 Karmann Ghia. It came with the original owners manual in German, a service book with stops in Geneva and Lisbon, and a fairly good pile of receipts from the first owner. The current (second) owner was a college girl that was finding that it was hard to keep everything up without Daddy around to do the work. She also had a couple of newsletters from an outfit called "The Volkswagen Type 34 Karmann Ghia Registry." The price was a little more than we wanted to pay but still doable so after a short discussion we decided to buy it.

Once we got it home and had a chance to join the Registry I found that this lovely car was painted in Bermuda with a Cobalt Blue top. The interior was original, as was the top, but the rest of the car had been repainted some time in the not too distant past. With this nice car we started becoming more active in the VW show scene and made our first pilgrimage to The Classic a year later where we joined a dozen other T34s. From then on its been a long succession of shows and new friends.

Part 2

Now, lets fast forward 8 years to Sunday, Jan. 30, 2000. Mary and I were down in Southern California for the VW/Porsche Toy and Literature show, a Porsche swap meet, and an O.C.T.O. Bus show. It was a fun time for me as I browsed through the various vendor tables for VW trinkets to add to my growing collection. Early on at the Toy & Lit show I found a couple VW Information magazines to help Lee Hedges with some documentation he's working on. And awhile later I found a source for an owner's manual for early '62 T34. Then on Sunday I cleaned out the Porsche swap meet of all of its VW parts scoring a set of Type 3 disk brake pads and a couple rebuild kits for the rear wheel cylinders. We then headed over to the O.C.T.O. meet and scored an NOS set of VW accessory head rests.

As we were getting ready to leave I noticed a Type 1 Karmann Ghia for sale across the street. With mild interest I wandered over and discovered it to be a '66 with the distinctive one year only dash trim. As I started to scan the body it suddenly hit me that this car had the same Bermuda and Cobalt Blue color scheme as our T34. Now my pulse started to quicken. We weren't down here to buy a car -- just a few trinkets. But the more I looked at the car the more it called out to me. It has almost all of its original paint -- a little body work was done just above the headlights and the right door has been repainted a slightly different color. But the rest of the body was clean -- a perfect nose -- and has no dents. The interior is original and the speedo shows 35,000 miles which, judging from the condition of the interior, I would bet means only 135,000 actual miles. Even the engine looks like it may never have been out of the car but it still purrs. As you may well have guessed by now, we ended up buying the car and driving it home that night. It behaved very well on the way home giving us no grief either over the Grapevine or Pacheco Pass before reaching home in pretty good time.