So back in 1994 my dad purchased my brother and I a car to drive. My brother wanted a bug, I actually wasn’t a big fan, but I wasn’t one to turn down a free ride. Long story short, my brother never drove the thing and the car became mine. I had the car for 7 years, it got me everywhere, it came to Missouri for college, it made it through most of college unscathed (except for a few drunk fraternity brothers of mine who decided to role a tire down the driveway right into the door), side note, they never did fess up to that one.

In the summer of 1998 the car got some love, it went to Sedalia Missouri and got a complete body overhaul, with wide fiberglass fenders and a new paint job, it also got some new wheels and eventually seats, headliner, and carpeting.

It was my first car, but it was sold on Ebay back in June 2001, my parents were moving on from Missouri and I was driving a 94 Golf (for another week or so before I got the Z-28) so the Super Beetle wasn’t getting much love back then. I couldn’t afford to keep it and my parents wanted to sell it.

So it went on ebay, and someone somewhat local purchased it, a guy out of Alton Illinois. I’ve always wondered what happened to the car after that, I always kept an eye out for it when driving around Alton, even as recent as last year when Kevin and I rented Harleys for the weekend, but I never did spot the car.

I’ve also always tried to dig through old emails, but I was missing a chunk of emails from November 1999 to sometime in 2002, I pretty much have every email I’ve ever received or sent since 1998, possibly even earlier, except for that missing window. Well, tonight I found those missing emails! I was going through old hard drives and finally located a PST with the missing emails, I was able to figure out who I sold the car to! At least, with an email address.

Well, that email address, @hotmail.com, no longer worked, but with a little more digging I found the name of the guy, and I think I even found him on facebook tonight! I sent him a message, we’ll see where it goes. I don’t exactly have the means right now to purchase and ship the car to California, where we now live (about 80 miles from where we originally purchased the car), but if I could get it purchased back from the guy I am sure I could find a place to store it in Missouri until the time came that I had a place for it out here.

I’ve owned a lot of cars since this Super Beetle left my life, never one as long as this car was in my life. We will see, I would love to get the car back, I only hope I have the opportunity to do so!

Here’s a photo of what it looked like after the restore back in 1998/1999 (photo from April 2000)

So this weekend while my beautiful wife was in town (haven’t seen her for three weeks!) I rented a car for the weekend? Why? Well, to be honest, the 350z wasn’t legal to be driving around on the roads of California! The temporary tags expired on the 1st, and I had planned to hit the DMV up on the 2nd, only to figure out that California had state employees on furlough so the DMV is closed the first three Fridays in April. Welcome to California! So I rented a car for the weekend, a Mid-sized from National (via Hotwire) and we picked out a black New Beetle. It wasn’t a half bad ride for the weekend, the windshield felt like it was 10 miles away, and I would hate to try to sit in the back seat, but for the two of us it worked out fine.

So you might have seen all the DotNetNuke posts lately, but what about just a Chris and Natalie post? Well here it goes! (you can follow along with some of the photos here on Flickr) Natalie and I had a blast in Las Vegas this past week. We went on the 3rd, a day before her Birthday. Her parents came out on the 3rd as well so we got to spend time with them for a few days before the DNN conference started up. During those few days we went and saw "KA" at the MGM, took a trip out to the Hoover Dam. After the Hoover Dam we took a quick jaunt North of Las Vegas looking for Red Rock, only to figure out an hour north that Red Rock was actually West of Las Vegas, so we turned around and headed back towards LV. It turned out perfect though, our little detour had delayed us enough to see the most brilliant sunset I've ever seen from Red Rock. Monday I had a DNN Core Team lunch, and then came back to the hotel to go with Natalie and meet Rich and Henry (two owners of Engage Software) and their wives for dinner and drinks. We repeated that process on Tuesday evening after the conference as well. Wednesday evening Natalie and I went to a gathering of people at Mix In Las Vegas, the restaurant on the 64th floor of "THEHotel" which is attached to the Mandalay Bay. The dinner was great and I must once again thank Tracy from www.t-worx.com for the most excellent evening. Thursday evening a large group of us, 17, got together for dinner. We met up in the bar at the Mandalay Bay and then decided to take Taxis down to the Venetian. Somehow we all actually made it to the same place and got to eat dinner together at one restaurant. It was a great time and I got to talk to Erik quite a bit, hopefully talking him into trying to get me to speak at SDC in the Netherlands next September! One can only hope :) Friday Natalie and I took off by ourselves for once. We went to Grand Canyon West, with the main goal of getting out onto the SkyWalk (www.grandcanyonskywalk.com). It was roughly 120 miles from the hotel, though took 2.5 hours as there was 14 miles of dirt/gravel road. The funny thing (well one of them) about the road, this 14 mile stretch was County maintained, as soon as we got to the Indian reservation grounds the road became paved... We were in Minivan for the trip, it was what you might call dirty at the end of the day. Lucky for the Minivan it didn't have a handbrake, just a footbrake/e-brake, otherwise I would have had an easier time getting the tail end of the car to swing out around the corners. We had a good time at Grand Canyon West, even though I have a little beef with the operation they have running there. The SkyWalk is very cool, and you essentially have to pay $79/person to get out on the SkyWalk. They don't allow you to take any personal items out there, for fear of you dropping them on the glass, or worse over the edge into the Canyon below. So you can't take a camera out there with you, they of course will gladly take your photo for you and sell it to you for $25/each. We ended up buying 2 photos, so we got the third one free. But they can only print them, not give them to you on CD, or even email them to you. The prints weren't what I would acll the highest of quality. I'm hoping I can email the staff there and try to get better quality photos from them. Friday evening we returned back to Vegas and went to see "O" at the Bellagio. It was another great show, definitely worth the investment to go see if you're in Vegas anytime soon. Saturday morning we headed back to the airport and flew back to St. Louis. We got home around 7pm and pretty much crashed. Sunday I headed out with Nick and went hunting. It might be deer season here in Missouri but I was hunting bugs, one particular blue one that I hear rumored to still be around Alton Illinois. Our hunt was not fruitful, we didn't find my old Super Beetle, but I will keep hunting. Sunday evening we joined Dominique and Colby for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory to...