I hope your next trip to AZ isn't going to be in the next few days; near record high temps are forecast through Tuesday and maybe Wednesday. 103 in Prescott, and 97 in Flagstaff !!??
Concerning old VWs, my dad bought a used '59 bus in 1960 or '61, and immediately began converting it into a camper that slept all 7 of us. After several iterations, we took it from Santa Maria to Colorado Springs and back, and then to Seattle for the Worlds Fair. (I was fascinated at the fair by a transparent coin-operated injection molding machine that dispensed a miniature copy of the space needle.
)
For the next few years, it was dad's daily driver to work and back, as well as the family shuttle every weekend to the beach in the summer. Sometime around '69, it developed a leaky rear axle seal, which became apparent from the noise of the reduction gears running dry, so dad took it to the dealer to get it fixed. When driving back from the dealer, he noticed the noise was still the same, so when he got home he looked and found the axle hadn't been touched; there was still road-grime coating all the bolts. He pitched a #$%* at the dealer the next day, and they were very apologetic about their oversight, and when he picked it up that evening, they told him they gave the bus a valve adjustment for free.
A few months later, it burned an exhaust valve, but he wasn't about to take it back to the dealer, so it was relegated to local commuter traffic to and from work, at speeds no more than 45 MPH. After about a year of that, while on the way to work, it snapped the head off a different exhaust valve, which proceeded to punch a silver dollar size hole through it's piston. He claimed it still ran well enough on two cylinders to pull off the road into a parking lot.
As I was already enrolled in the high school auto shop classes, we towed the bus to the school, and I rebuilt the motor as a class project, with the provision I could drive it anytime dad didn't need it.
