1992 Volkswagen Eurovan GL

With the junkyard literally full of minivans from the big three North American automakers, this one definitely was a bit of an odd duck.

While there were the occasional VW driving around my area, they were almost always cars like Jetta's and Passats with the occasional new Beetle tossed into the mix.

You never saw a VW van roaming around, so see this particular van here was a bit of an anomaly.

This is was the first year for the Eurovan to arrive in Canada and was only available here for only 10 years.

While it certainly looked like a really good people carrier with lots of seating and a lot of headroom - something that a 6 footer like myself would appreciate. It did seem to be rather utilitarian in the way its interior was laided out. It certainly had a lot more hard corners and spartan creature comforts inside compared to your typical Dodge Caravan of that time.

Another odd thing was that while more minivans typically came with a 6 or sometimes 4 cylinder engine, this Eurovan had a 2.5 liter 5 cylinder engine.

While I would wonder if this mechanical oddball would make it a bit of a nightmare when it came to maintenance and repair, this particular van seemed to have enjoyed a very productive life since the odometer indicated that it had traveled almost 300,000 kilometers.

This Eurovan was driven off the boat from Germany and onto Canadain soil in September of 1993 and was bought by someone that lived in a city in Eastern Ontario - about a 5-hour drive from where the van sits now.

In 2004 it made the perilous trip through Toronto and spent the remainder of its time in a university town that was about an hour away from the junkyard.

In 2015 the van was taken off the road and languished someplace until this July when it finally came to rest here.

It had a long strange trip.