good times

If cross-over vehicles are all the rage at present then custom vans were the bombdiggity in the eighties.

I still remember the test drive in our soon-to-be custom van. In retrospect, I can't think of why my parents would have tortured themselves by bringing me and my sister along. Maybe to see how well the four of us could fit in there? All I know is that Julie and I sat in every available seat during that journey (there were eight) and fought the whole time over who got to sit where.

There's a reason they're called custom vans; I think it's like buying a pre-fab home where you get to pick out certain touches, such as paint color and doorknobs. We affectionately called our custom conversion "Good Times" (a.k.a. "Cave on Wheels"). Good Times featured (but was not limited to):

• Fully carpeted floor and upholstered walls
• Four fully-adjustable captains chairs (the back two could rotate 360 degrees)
• Queen-sized bed
• Modest dinner table with four cup holders that morphed into a checker/chess board (two optional docking locations for the table, one in the front of the vehicle and one in the rear).
• Luggage rack (in case we ran out of room inside)
• Mini-blinds

Yes, I said mini-blinds. We furled and unfurled those blinds hundreds of times over on family vacations that spanned a decade.

I've included a picture of my family crossing the Texas state border on one such occassion. (I'm the nine-year old goofball sitting on the panhandle. As a nineteen-year old, my family was still driving Good Times and I had to drive it briefly as a student at TCU; In addition to being a rolling Cave, it was an embarassment to drive as it had the turning radius of an 18-wheeler and stalled every time it was in reverse).

Ah, those were good times.