Love those old beetles! Learned to drive a car on them, too. (Though I’d driven a stick shift tractor long before that.) I’ve owned three - a 68 beetle, a 64 van (Black and Yellow, the bumble bus), and an automatic stick shift (terrible pos tranny). Those were the tree hugger’s ride of choice back in the day - I could get 33 or so mpgs out of them with the automatic choke repaced by a manual on the 34 PICT 3 carb. Never towed anything with any of them, though I car-topped a Grumman with them all.
The beetles required a lot of rope work to secure a boat and, when loaded, were a real bear on the highway in a strong crosswind. Pretty decent off-road, or in snow as long as you expected the understeer. Giving credit where its due, those early VW heaters worked great all summer long - scorched and melted a pair of high topped wading tennys with the 68. (Which I could get up to 83 on the flats, BTW.)
Drove that van until once when returning from a rock fest I had a flat. Put the jack in the port and pumped and pumped and pumped and the wheel just wouldn’t rise. That’s when I noticed I was crushing the frame. But I only paid $100 for it and drove it for years, I got way more than my money’s worth out of it.
My father used to tow a fishing boat and camp gear with a Corvair (another fuel economy car of the day - unsafe at any speed? Not particularly for the time), and the trailer hitch (and seat belts) were aftermarket additions. We took that rig and our family of four across Death Valley and over the mountains at night to prevent overheating the engine. Makes a Prius towing a jet ski seem like a pretty viable set up… though I still would wonder, WHY?
And, GerryH, you have some great paddling home ground!
We had a 74 Super Beetle that took us all over Colorado, half way across the country in a couple of ice storms, carried a load of river rock for the garden and several hundred pounds of cement 2’x2’ slabs for a patio. Then the kids and dog got too big for it.
I get a light duty class 3 hitch installed on all of my cars as soon as I get them. I would not own a car without one. I do my own remodeling, for one thing, and have a 4.5’ x 8’ stake side trailer for hauling lumber, doors, kitchen cabinets, etc. Enables me to get great deals at antique fairs and yard sales because I can pay cash and haul big stuff on the spot (just show up the last hour of the final sale day when the seller is looking at the prospect of hefting that overpriced Mission sideboard back into his own truck and suddenly you have a deal.) Usually cost $250 to $300 to get a class 3 hitch put on and most of mine have paid for themselves, like the time a neighbor paid me $60 just to drive my trailer to a house where he was getting a whole set of kitchen cabinets for free from a friend who was remodeling. I didn’t have to load or unload any of it and he also gave me a $300 stainless steel range hood that was in perfect shape, just needed to clean it a bit.
I have a kayak trailer too but rarely use it since I ditched all the heavy boats and canoes and the roof rack is less hassle with light boats. Even had a hitch on my Volvo 850T (could actually pull our 19’ travel trailer with that 240 hp engine) and have more recently pulled modest loads short distances with my current underpowered Mazda CX5 six speed stick.
Since I bought the GMC box truck conversion camper with a factory frame class 4 hitch last year I will henceforth probably spare the Mazda for all but the smallest local hauls. I did determine that I can now haul all 7 of the current boats in my fleet in one trip now, with 5 inside the truck and two on the trailer cradles. Though technically, since 4 of the boats are folding kayaks, I could haul all of them with the Mazda too if I cared to, with the 3 hard shells on the Thule rack and trailer and the folder duffels inside the car. And all those boats combined would weigh less than having a mid-sized boyfriend and mid-sized dog in the car.
The users of jet skis around the Firth of Clyde have primarily been responsible for the deaths of seals and injury of harbour porpoise/dolphins. There are two particular morons who have been arrested on the water by police for travelling in the wake of the Cumbrae ferry, which only does around 8-11 knots as the crossing is very short. During the summer I had two adults buzz me in my kayak. I took out my hand held VHF and they scarpered pretty dammned quick.
That’s nothing I drove my friends Prius across country from California to Georgia towing a utility trailer the entire way and back. We did it in December had some difficulty with snow berms, The Prius does not like to go over snow berms. We also got caught in a hailstorm and we’re close to getting caught in a tornado but we thankfully dodged those.
We got a lot of strange looks but we had a great time and there wasn’t any issue with the trailer it was small enough that the Prius had a very easy time dealing with it. And we did not take the main interstate on the way to Georgia we took the back roads
After being a Road Warrior since the 1960s and traveling around the West with an outdoor career, expect all kinds of things to happen. I have been invited to communes, Ken Kesey festivals, Dead shows, Burning Man, sweat lodges on the Navajo Res, the Fiddling contest in Weiser Idaho, cow camps and a lot of elk camps. America has great diversity and wonderful surprises. Our job is to go find them and appreciate them .
