Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Beast.

The Beast. It's a wonderful truck - one that we took many family camping/surfing trips in Japan in, and that has found a home in BC.


The Beast.
This picture is from last year. But we're taking the canoe, too, so I thought it was appropriate. Especially since the poor guy's downstairs in the garage in pieces.

Until now. The Beast will be my mother's chariot to the east, starting tomorrow. My father is rebuilding the front end and the two of us have given it much TLC over the last few days.

It's a Nissan Safari - or a Nissan Patrol as they are sold as in other places. They are (to my knowledge - please don't quote me on this. And no, I don't have time to do research...) only marketed outside of North America (most notably in Asia and Australia), and are awesome. It's a diesel, manual transmission, right-hand drive, workhorse of a truck. I "learned" (those are sarcastic quotation marks there people) how to drive stick on it, and am more than overjoyed that my father is relinquishing it for this NC adventure.

We get stared at a lot on the street in Vancouver - could be that the diesel engine is super loud and is an affront to the delicate Canadian nature of those around us, but most likely the right-hand drive confuses the hell out of people. When I get a particularly hard stare while sitting in the passenger seat on the left side of the car, my favorite thing to do is to throw both hands up over my head and yell "look ma! No hands!". Priceless.

Cross your fingers that the parts don't break, the engine stays happy and all goes well. You, ummm, can't buy replacement parts for it here in the US, so....yeah....here goes.

Granted, I'll be in my Honda.

2 comments:

Samantha Bangayan said...

LUCK!!

caitlinvb said...

Thanks Sam! The only vehicle hiccup was one of the windshield wipers popping off in the middle of the pouring rain and scaring my mom half to death. 2 minutes later it was snapped back on, and away we went. It performed like a champ! A loud black smoke spewing champ, but a champ :)