Share love of all things Volkswagen at BugFair
The folks at Disney aren’t the only ones hoping to see Herbie, the Love Bug get off the ground this weekend.
Disney’s “Herbie: Fully Loaded” goes into wide release this weekend, in hopes that a whole new generation will fall in love with the ‘60s vintage Volkswagen Beetle that first captured moviegoers’ hearts in the 1969 movie, “The Love Bug.”
The promoters of Sunday’s BugFair at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center want to see the same thing, but for a different reason.
The 21st annual fete of all things Volkswagen features its replica of the original 1961 “Herbie” set up on a teeter-totter. Promoters hope to balance the car with contributions of canned food for Second Harvest Food Bank.
Admission to the show is $5 for adults; $3 with the donation of a canned food item. In this case, the bigger the can the better.
“The River City Volkswagen Club has had a Herbie for quite a while,” show promoter Troy Hobbs explained. “He’s a replica of Herbie from the end of the first movie, when he’s been through that whole race and he’s smoking and kind of battered up. We enter him in the Coeur d’Alene parade every year.”
Hobbs figures having the fifth movie about the 1961 Volkswagen Beetle open this weekend will help bring a few more people out as the car show enters its third decade.
Along with “The Love Bug” and “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” the little race car with a mind of its own and the signature No. 53 on his hood has starred in “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo,” “Herbie Goes Bananas” and “Herbie Rides Again.” Along the way the car has shared the screen with Dean Jones, Buddy Hackett, Suzanne Pleshette, Don Knotts, Cloris Leachman and Helen Hayes while winning both hearts and races.
While the show is called a “BugFair” after the popular Beetle, the show will feature Volkswagens of all shapes and sizes.
“The Beetle is the most popular, but we see the vans and the Karmann Ghias and the Rabbits,” Hobbs said. “We see the Things, which was the Volkswagen version of a jeep.”
BugFair is an all-make and model Volkswagen car show and swap meet.
Included in the show is what’s called “a valve cover race.”
“It’s like the Pinewood derby only you make the car out of a Volkswagen valve cover,” Hobbs explained “You even see things like that at V-8 car shows now.
“It one of those things where you see kids and adults competing side-by-side.”