So back in 1994 my dad purchased my brother and I a car to drive. My brother wanted a bug, I actually wasn’t a big fan, but I wasn’t one to turn down a free ride. Long story short, my brother never drove the thing and the car became mine. I had the car for 7 years, it got me everywhere, it came to Missouri for college, it made it through most of college unscathed (except for a few drunk fraternity brothers of mine who decided to role a tire down the driveway right into the door), side note, they never did fess up to that one.
In the summer of 1998 the car got some love, it went to Sedalia Missouri and got a complete body overhaul, with wide fiberglass fenders and a new paint job, it also got some new wheels and eventually seats, headliner, and carpeting.
It was my first car, but it was sold on Ebay back in June 2001, my parents were moving on from Missouri and I was driving a 94 Golf (for another week or so before I got the Z-28) so the Super Beetle wasn’t getting much love back then. I couldn’t afford to keep it and my parents wanted to sell it.
So it went on ebay, and someone somewhat local purchased it, a guy out of Alton Illinois. I’ve always wondered what happened to the car after that, I always kept an eye out for it when driving around Alton, even as recent as last year when Kevin and I rented Harleys for the weekend, but I never did spot the car.
I’ve also always tried to dig through old emails, but I was missing a chunk of emails from November 1999 to sometime in 2002, I pretty much have every email I’ve ever received or sent since 1998, possibly even earlier, except for that missing window. Well, tonight I found those missing emails! I was going through old hard drives and finally located a PST with the missing emails, I was able to figure out who I sold the car to! At least, with an email address.
Well, that email address, @hotmail.com, no longer worked, but with a little more digging I found the name of the guy, and I think I even found him on facebook tonight! I sent him a message, we’ll see where it goes. I don’t exactly have the means right now to purchase and ship the car to California, where we now live (about 80 miles from where we originally purchased the car), but if I could get it purchased back from the guy I am sure I could find a place to store it in Missouri until the time came that I had a place for it out here.
I’ve owned a lot of cars since this Super Beetle left my life, never one as long as this car was in my life. We will see, I would love to get the car back, I only hope I have the opportunity to do so!
Here’s a photo of what it looked like after the restore back in 1998/1999 (photo from April 2000)
