Singleton Volkswagen enthusiasts Andrew and Joanne Mill will travel all the way to New South Wales to attend the Valla Volkswagen Spectacular festival with their 44-year-old kombi.
The event gathers Volkswagen owners from all over Australia every two years and organises games, functions, balls, dinners and activities for the motor enthusiasts to attend.
During the week-long festival, Mr and Ms Mill will be living in their iconic blue 1972 kombi and participating in communal dinners, parades, ‘how low can you go’ limbo competitions, and cruises.
The couple have been members of the WA Volkswagen Club for a long time and own two kombis and two other cars.
“My grandfather had one so I’ve always been around them, my mum had one and when we first started seeing each other he [Andrew] had one as well, I’ve got no choice really, I was always going to end up with one,” Ms Mill said.
“Everyone was talking about it ‘let’s do it, let’s do it’ and we were like ‘yeah, no, yeah no, yes we will, no we won’t’ and then we said ‘bugger it, let’s just do it’”.
They will be travelling together with six more members of the WA Volkswagen Club and three more vehicles to Valla.
After the event is over, they will jump on their Volkswagens and explore the region before driving more than 6,000 kilometres in three weeks back to Western Australia together.
“It’s a long way to go with a car that’s an old car but the good thing about Volkswagen is that it doesn’t matter where you go, if something happens to the car you just have to put out a shout-out and people turn up, it’s amazing,” Ms Mill said.
“I’ve done a fair bit of work on it so we should be alright,” Mr Mill said.
Ms and Mr Mill said they are thrilled about the trip, set to start in July 21.
“We have never seen snow so we are very excited,” Ms Mill said.