I’ve had Joomla sites on and off for a good few years now – it’s now almost 5 years since the whole History Direct thing went pearshaped – but the problem was that migrating from 2.5 to 3 was proving more than my poor little melon could cope with. After the whole debacle of losing the site when I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.5 I just couldn’t be bothered with all that again.

WordPress as a platform had a number of really attractive things going for it, not least that it appears to be extremely easy to update from one version to the next. It’s certainly developed massively since we originally started the History Times back in 2010. If we’d stuck with WP back then rather than go over to Joomla I wouldn’t have had this entire debacle! Anyway, it all went pretty well, with minimal swearing, and the only real time I had to spend was sorting some of the images out, in particular the featured image at the beginning of each post. I’m not 100% convinced that the galleries are working quite the way I want them to at the minute but they work and do at least have touch functionality for mobile.

Talking of featured images, talk of the mythical German Job road trip has reared its head again recently and planning is afoot – albeit at a very early stage just now. Brad and I now have a shared Google map of all the places we fancy heading to as part of the route to / from Wolfsburg and it’s starting to fill up nicely – mainly with breweries and bunkers. What’s pretty cool is that the route is almost working itself out rather than us making conscious decisions on mileage etc. The timescale we’re working to is relatively vague (some time in the next 5 years), but he has small  humans to consider and I don’t have a hugely paying job so I think that works quite nicely. It gives us plenty of time for bunker / WWII submarine research, and to save up for the fuel and merch bills which isn’t going to be cheap. There will be much merch!

Now I just have to persuade Brad of the merits of continuing another 140 miles to Berlin……

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You may recall from the Volksworld Show post, that after we’d got back from the show back in March we spent some time putting together an email to Volksworld Magazine in the hope that they might think that Carlos was worthy of appearing on the pages of their publication.

Well, somewhere round the beginning of May, I had a call from Brad – and he was more than a little bit excited!

The reason behind his excitement? Well it wasn’t the fact that he’d come home after yet another 48 hour stint in the office to find the latest copy of Tax Monthly Magazine sitting waiting for him on the doormat. Nor was it his Elton John tickets. Oh no, it was something altogether more appealing than that!

Not only had Carlos made it into that month’s magazine’s Readers’ Rides section, but he was Car of the Month!

And, there was a photo of him on the Contents page!

All we need to do now is somehow get Clarence featured in the magazine and the whole family will have made it in there – although Brad did suggest that we could maybe avoid this becoming some sort of VW arms race……..

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Well as it happens, he made it under his own steam. Admittedly this was after he’d spent over 2 and a half hours waiting for the breakdown guy to arrive, but fortunately said breakdown guy simply diagnosed some slightly misadjusted points so he was soon back on his way! It’s almost like these old VWs know when the most inconvenient time to break down is……

Anyway, as the car was to be used to take the condemned man to the site of his execution, we needed to get some ribbons on it. I was a little disappointed not to be getting in on the act and ribboning up the bug or the bus, but the fact was that it was a very long trip down to Hanbury Manor and I wanted to make sure I got there ok. Oh, and Andy offered me a lift – which meant that I didn’t have to drive home the following day. Which, as it turns out, was a very good thing!

The journey to the church was a little like something out of Top Gear, in that we kept overtaking Brad and Jim in the KG and taking photos out of the window. Unfortunately those are all on Brad’s camera, as mine is still buried somewhere at the bottom of my storage room. I’ll add those at a later date, and in at least one of them you can see Jim holding up the horn push button, which fell off half way to the church. I hope Brad quickly realises that this is simply a part of owning an old VW, and something that you just have to get used to!

After an awesome weekend I was very glad to have taken the Monday off work. I’m not exactly motivated at the moment following the announcement a couple of weeks ago and the wedding had been pretty tough emotionally (I miss her), so what better way to forget about the stresses and strains of recent events than to get out in the bug for an hour or so in the sunshine? Had a lovely little potter around, with the soundtrack being provided (quite loudly) by ACDC – it’s a pretty awesome combination! On the way back to the ranch I took the opportunity to pop in and see our friend John at Beetle People for a coffee and a chat, and thoroughly enjoyed catching up with him.

As promised, now Brad has returned from honeymoon here are the shots we took of Carlos en route to the church!

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