50 years, two continents, two white Volvos, and a circle
My dad bought his Volvo P1800 in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1967.
This guy.
Not that exact P1800. That one's from Wikipedia, but you get the idea. Same car.
He was the dashing young Norwegian doctor doing his residency at the University of Kansas, zipping down Mass Street with his beautiful wife in that white imported sports car. The same car Simon Templar drove in “The Saint”. When he and my mom went back to Norway in '68 just a few months before I was born, they had it shipped. I remember squeezing into the back seat, all three inches of it, as a kid, and, later, driving it.
He sold it some 20-odd years ago. Last I heard, it was driving in Finnsnes, the town where he was born. The same town we're going back to, in a white Volvo, this summer. The Volvo Traci is picking up for us in Gothenburg, Sweden.
There are some circles being completed here. I left Norway to attend KU in 1992, 25 years after he was there. Now we pick up a Volvo in Sweden, which we'll then ship back here to Kansas, in the opposite direction. Granted, it's not a curvaceous sports car this time, and I'm not near as young as he was then nor as raffish, but then you're not cramming six people into a P1800, even if one of them is tiny.
No, we went and bought a Swedish suburbmobile, the XC90.
But hey, it was cheaper than renting. Here's why: The nifty Volvo Overseas Delivery Program sells you a Volvo here in the U.S. for less than list price, flies you over to pick it up at the factory, equips you with insurance and registration to tool around Europe, and then ships the car to you back in the states.
We're pretty sure we'll fit, somehow. Volvo's Overseas Delivery Program office in Gothenburg is setting us up with a roof box. Volvo-branded, of course.
It's nuts, really. But then so are rental car prices in Norway. Well, that's not entirely fair: If you're a family of four or five, you can rent a decent station wagon that'll fit all of you and your stuff for a road trip at a non-insane rate. Renting a car for road trip in Norway is doable and the way I'd recommend seeing the country. That is, until you need something with room for more than five.
We're six.
Oops.
For some reason, rental car rates jump up and punch you in the eyeballs the moment you look at 7-seaters or bigger. It would have been cheaper to rent two smallish cars. I kid you not, and I've been able to find no explanation for this. It just is, and I looked at every rental company I could find. And don't suggest an RV. I looked. They're all made out of solid gold, as best I can tell from the rates I was quoted.
So it is, then, that we bought a white Volvo. Closed the deal just a few miles from where my dad would have closed his, at a dealership long gone by now. And we'll drive it from Hokksund, where he practiced medicine most of his career and where I grew up, to Finnsnes, his hometown, and Senja, where he spent summers as boy.
Closing circles, one white Volvo at a time.
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