My Volksworld Show 2003

I'm not sure how it happened but my van was invited to have my van take part in the Volksworld Show 2003 at Sandown Park, I had never been to the show but I knew that it was where the best Vw's are shown and frankly I wasn't sure that my van would fit in. The mention of four free entry tickets for the weekend and passes for camping persuaded me that even if the van did look naff the idea of a cheap weekend ligging off of the Volksworld magazine would cure my embarrassment.

I cleaned, waxed and waxed the van and when I couldn't clean anymore I got Jo, Mike and Claire to put a couple more coats of wax on.

My main problem was that the van wasn't ready to show as I had ordered Weed eater dampers, disengagers and new windscreen wipers from Creative Engineering and none had turned up with a week to go. Thankfully the dampers arrived allowing me to slam the van, after many-stressed phone calls still no wipers! (Any one who was at the show would have seen why I didn't receive my parts; they were working on their own show van! It was a space framed Split van on air bags and all round pop outs. Very nice! But so were my wipers, slackers!)

When I arrived I saw the standard of the Vw's in the car park alone I almost bottled it, but when I realised most of the cars turning up were towed in trailer boxes behind very expensive executive 4x4s, I filled a bucket and washed the 5 hours worth of road grime off of the van and proudly drove the van into the main hall.

Inside there was every type of Vw you can imagine and there were people that had travelled from all around the world to show their motors. Everyone was putting the final touches to their buses, of course waxing but wiping windows with newspaper, as it doesn't glare off of the hall lights! Pretty extreme measures but if they were doing it so were we. Just to make us realise how mental this whole weekend was going to be we received a phone call from Nic, saying he could see Jo cleaning the van on the live web cam just above us! (See pic)

We then walk around the show and checked out the amazing Vw's that were being pushed, scraping into the arena, it was great to hear the sound of the drag race Vw's roar into their show spaces.

We left the handed over our keys at 12.30 am and burnt into Wimbledon in Mikes van to try and find a place to stay for the night.

When we returned to Sandown the whole place had been transformed, we had to queue to get in and park and once we got inside all the cars and vans had been shuffled into new positions at weird angles it was just cool how the organisers had transformed a shamble of parked Vw's into a magazine photo shoot.

That was it, that was my Volksworld Show 2003, by the time visitors had arrived on the Saturday they had missed the best part, the rest of the weekend was a blur but that Friday night was epic.