ABSTRACT
Before I ever imagined studying the phenomena of VW campervan subcultures, I found myself on the internet shopping forum ‘Ebay’ one evening buying what I called my ‘midlife crisis’ campervan; a Wesfalia Bay, 1972 model. Perhaps the idea of buying the van evoked a sense of possibility where past freedoms were nostalgically recalled in the fleeting moment between winning the item and doing the bank transfer. I consoled myself via such commodity acquisition ‘out of the blue’, hoping perhaps that the ‘good old days’ could somehow be retrieved. The idea that an old classic Volkswagen campervan could enable a return to a world where motility, freedom and being carefree could be achievable again was momentarily articulated through an imagined mobility. As the aforementioned vehicle however was delivered to my door, I began to realize that whatever positive thoughts I had about the holiday ideal at the point of purchase, was in light contrast to the dark reality, which followed. For my dream machine was actually a faulty, rusty, oil hungry, old vehicle which was both difficult to drive and expensive to maintain. It was then I realized that despite an instant attachment to what I would describe as an aesthetically pleasing and thus emotionally seductive form of leisure transport, it was actually more like a 2 star youth hostel on wheels. I panicked about what I was then meant to do with my new mobile home. Where was I to drive? I hadn’t thought of how to plan a holiday actually using it, or even considered if I would actually inhabit it at all. The desire to flee the ‘horror of home’ Baudelaire, cited in (De Botton, 2002, p. 32) was swiftly replaced by frantically taking a paradigm shift to ‘there’s no place like home’. Paradoxically for some reason I still liked the idea of owning the van as long as it was parked securely on the drive. So in a position where I neither wanted to sell it or keep it, I joined a local VW campervan club in the North East of England and used the support of other owners to help me understand how without any particular logic or rationale I had joined their club. This then became my research vehicle in many senses of the word (see Figure 17.1).
