"Bird" (Bird)
11/19/2013 at 18:45 • Filed to: None
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"Bird" (Bird)
11/19/2013 at 18:45 • Filed to: None | 4
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So here's a picture of the Lada Ferro1911 and I !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .
Klaus Schmoll
> Bird
11/19/2013 at 19:44 |
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I still think that you guys are crazy. Buying a car unseen on another continent by trusting someone else is quite a bold move in my book. And having it stored or trusting people to store it properly for months until you actually go there to drive it across Europe is another bold move. But I like, nope love the the idea! I expect lots of pics and detailed write-ups when you are there!
Ladas have a special place in my heart. My grandad's second, and last car, was a Lada, or a Shiguli as the first ones imported into Eastern Germany were stil badged as. It was one of the first cars to run off the production lines in Togliatti, back when the Fiat guys who just sold them the tooling were still training the Russians on how to use it to build cars. These early cars were revered as the best Ladas ever as neither party would commit to any "that'll do" attitude in front of the other.
After my grandad passed, my mom inherited the vehicle. She had to pull strings to be able to attend driving classes ASAP. Being a doctor helped there, as it did with us getting a home phone. ("What if there is a big emergency and...?") Effing planned economy. But that aside, she had it stripped, all the rust removed, and repainted. A process that a vehicle would undergo about every ten years or so, and 2-3 times in their lifespan, in commie times, as new vehicles were hard to come by. She also ordered a new one in about 1985, expecting to get something like your car. Delivery date was expected to be around the year 2000.
Well, in '89 they decided to flee and test their luck on the the better side of the iron curtain. The Lada took us there with only a few niggles.
Fun fact: They never told me where they were planning on going. Telling an Elementary School kid about it would have been too much of a safety risk! They told me that we were going to a wedding in Hungary.
Anyway, I don't wan't to bore with more personal details. Just know that this commie car was the one that took me and my family to freedom!
Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast.
> Klaus Schmoll
11/19/2013 at 19:56 |
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You can't stop at the most interesting part of the story. Let's hear the whole escape from the Stasi thing!
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Bird
> Klaus Schmoll
11/19/2013 at 20:02 |
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Please, the personal details aren't boring at all. That's an amazing story!
We're definitely a bit crazy, but I think we'll be ok. I believe that the trustworthy people still outnumber the scammers. Besides, if anything we were the sketchy party through the whole buying process. I mean would you believe it if two Americans called and said they wanted to buy the Lada you were selling? I think we did it the smartest way possible and hired an independent party to oversee the transaction and store the car. At the very least I know the guy we hired is a real person with a real business. Besides, even if the worst happens, and we show up and don't have a car...we'll find another one...We know our trip os going to run into some major snags, we're planning to sit back and work with whatever happens.
I think our car has went through the repaint process a couple times just like you said. I wish we had more solid details, but from what we were told, the car was a one-owner, or at least one-family car. From the condition I would have to say it was taken care of by the kind of person who experienced what it was like to wait for years to get a car. I have to imagine it was special to the man who owned it. It wouldn't have survived this long with the harsh winters in Narva if it didn't have a caring owner.
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Klaus Schmoll
> Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast.
11/19/2013 at 20:07 |
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Well, I don't know how well versed you are in the breakdown of Eastern European communism.
The Hungarians decided to look the other way on their border to Austria. So my parents decided to take the chance. By the time we went there, it was just a weird border crossing.
But my Dad, took his chance a little earlier, and had to crawl through the mud, evade foot patrols, etc. Only to appear in a small Austrian village the next day looking like a hobo. Some nice people took him in, washed his clothes, and gave him a lift to Vienna. He sent us a postcard from there. It read like nothing, but it was enough for us to know that he'd done it!
More?
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Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast.
> Klaus Schmoll
11/19/2013 at 20:59 |
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I love these kind of stories. They give me faith in human nature. I had an uncle that managed to escape and survive the madness of WWII Russia, so it is an area of interest to me.
lucky's pepper
> Klaus Schmoll
11/19/2013 at 21:28 |
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You should absolutely take the time to write this in detail and post it here. I would love to read it!
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Bird
> Klaus Schmoll
11/19/2013 at 23:38 |
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Please, I think we would all love to her as much as you would want to tell. I know I've learned tons of history researching our car, AutoVAZ, the Soviet auto industry, and our trip in general. It can make it hard. I get sucked into the personal stories just like yours and get distracted. I end up learning amazing, but totally unrelated things to whatever I was trying to research.