I flew to Auckland during Christmas season - for New Zealand this meant shine your little lights in Summertime. My girl 'down there' had gone to a lot of trouble to plan an excursion to South Island.This included buying a bug with a seized engine from her friend who didn't know you put oil in the back where the engine was ever so often. Her father was a metal worker with a car bay in the garage. He dropped a '55 engine into the '65 frame and we were good to go - sort of. It wanted a paint job, new exhaust pipes and some fitments such as a water tight window washer tube dash-pump. We attended to some of these and hit the road. With a slight wind behind her, Thunderguts could actually hit 50. We couldn't attract the interest of the militia by speeding, but I was came from a country where the right side of the road was now wrong, so I had to bear watching as instinct made me bear right. I has helped by the oddness of shifting with my left hand and hugging the little steerage wheel with my right.
My testing by fire began when we drove from Auckland to the south part of North Island in order to take the ferry to South Island. It's a large ferry for a short but deep ocean crossing. We came late and tired to the campground and woke a bit groggy in the morning and even before breakfast discovered that Thunderguts had a flat with barely fifteen minutes to loading time!
The method of attaching the hubs to the wheels involved bolts not nuts and the jack looked like a piece of uncooked linguine. We didn't exactly shriek with anxiety but our concern reached the tent next door, which just 'happened' to have in it a couple the male half of which had once won a competition for fastest changing of a Volkswagen tire. In much less time than it takes to read this scread he had us going to a successful ferry loading on our spare.

Not everything about the little auto was so endearing but it was a miracle of minimum transportation and we made a successful round trip when we couldn't afford the bus.