THE LIFE OF A VW FANATIC.

Before you begin to dream about the #vanlife, consider this: When these cars are running right, there’s no better way to travel. When they break down, YOU’LL WISH YOU’D NEVER TAKEN THIS ROAD.

The #vanlife movement, popularized on social media in recent years, is a bit of a mirage.

The glitzy pictures shared on Instagram and Snapchat usually depict a handsome young couple relaxing in an exotic locale. He’s playing a ukulele, sporting a scruffy beard and an open flannel shirt, sunset blazing in the background. She’s a stunning brunette, practicing yoga on a white sand beach, wearing a skimpy bikini.

The dream is simple: Sell everything you have. Buy a nifty Volkswagen camper. Spend your days in blissful drift, traveling the road while working remotely — if at all. The best #vanlifers, as they’re known, find sponsors who bankroll their adventures in return for pimping propane stoves, puffy down jackets and mountain bikes.

It’s an escapist fantasy playing out for a select few.

For the rest of us, #realvanlife is more like it. Picture a sweaty middle-aged man, stalled on the side of the road, rolling around on the gravelly shoulder, cursing softly with a slippery wrench in his hand. His angry wife is steaming in the back, reminding him how much they paid for a rebuilt transmission just last month.

VW vans attract a peculiar sort of fanatic. It’s an addiction that delivers dreamy highs, tempered by intermittent lows filled with exasperation, anxiety and dread. It’s not always a pretty picture. And there are no sponsors.

So, before you begin to dream about the #VanLife, consider this: Volkswagen vans have a personality of their own. The people who drive them know it all too well. That personality is often bipolar. A mix of form, function and failure. When these cars are running right, there’s no better way to travel. When they break down, which happens all too often, you’ll wish you’d never taken this road.

Let me explain.

It started for me back in high school, thanks to my buddy Kurt. He was a Volkswagen fanatic, driving a souped-up Scirocco and reading Hot VWs magazine on the regular. We’d hang out after school and I’d flip through the pages. It was basically VW porn. There was a rare split-window Beetle. Or a cherry red Karmann Ghia. The Squarebacks and Fastbacks and Things — air-cooled VW classics —

were all restored to perfection. But my eye would always wander toward the ultimate marriage of style and utility: The VW Camper. They had pop-top canopies that would lift the roof, providing head room and extra sleeping space. Two beds. Sinks. Stoves. Some had hammocks across the front two seats. I didn’t realize it right away, but I was hooked.

I worked my way up to my first camper slowly. At 17, I bought a busted-up ’72 Super Beetle, replaced a fender, did some body work and painted it bright yellow. It was like driving a Meyer lemon. After I got to Rutgers College in New Jersey, I briefly took hold of a sleek, red Ghia — Volkswagen’s flirtation with a sports car look. Problem was, it had the same engine as a Bug. Sleek look, slowpoke.

At the tender age of 19, I bought my first pop-top. It was a heap of a 1971 pop-top camper — faded white paint, icebox, sink, double bed and all. The resurgence of the Grateful Dead, and the emergence of other jam bands at the time, made these old vans popular among secondgeneration hippies. But this particular VW was in bad shape. On the East Coast, these poor classics did not fare well in terms of salty roads and rust. In today’s crazy van market, it would be worth thousands. My college roommates couldn’t believe I actually paid money for it. (I think I got it for $500.)

My buddies changed their tune when it was time to tailgate at a football game. Or head out to the hills on a camping trip. Or catch a Dead show. Or just drive around town and soak in the vibe.

There’s a funny thing that happens when you drive a VW bus — especially the old ones. People smile and wave. You get the occasional peace sign. Best of all, if you run across a fellow van driver coming in the opposite direction, there’s always an acknowledgment. A smile and a wave for members of a secret society, where everyone knows the handshake.

It’s corny as hell, but you’d love it. Trust me.

VW buses were sold in the States, in various shapes and sizes, from 1950 until 2003. Over those 50-plus years, and continuing until today, the vehicles became a countercultural icon, popularized by hippies and surfers and road warriors from coast to coast: You could transport a load of people, and the vans were relatively cheap to buy and fix. You could work on the simple engines yourself!

If you happened to have the camper model — whose interior

was designed by the famed firm Westfalia — then you’d have the aforementioned beds and sinks and such. Some models came with an ice chest or fridge, a two-burner stove and a little table in the back, where your buddies could play cards while you tooled around town.

None of the campers have any juice, in terms of horsepower, so driving a camper forces you to slow down and enjoy the road: We’ll get there when we get there. As camper addicts like to put it: “Slow car. Fast House.”

Just the same, the societal cachet — fueled by the VW’s enduring popularity and fan base, social media trends like #VanLife, and an ever-tightening supply, due to these campers growing older and older — has created quite the marketplace.

These days, a classic VW hippie bus can fetch anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000, or more, depending on the level of restoration.

But it’s not all fun and games. The problem with VW vans is mechanical in nature. They can be very reliable, especially back when they were relatively new. But after a couple of hundred thousand miles, or 20 to 30 years, challenges begin to emerge.

In my amateur opinion, German engineers made great engines, but they never quite mastered the wiring side of things. So you get to know your fuse box. And as the years roll by, and the parts become harder to find, the VW camper addict begins to live a life of anxiety and concern.

We listen to every knock and bump with trepidation. There’s constant worry about leaking fuel lines and worn-out transmissions. Don’t get me started on cracked CV boots, faulty coolant hoses, worn bushings and rusty gas tanks. It’s all a source of high blood pressure. And each generation of VW camper had its own foibles.

The earliest models from the 1960s and ’70s — made famous by Woodstock hippies and the fictional “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” stoner Jeff Spicoli — were aircooled and pretty simple. With engines that ranged from 1,100 to 2,000 CCs, they crawled up hills at their own pace. Over the years, parts became more scarce, but the availability of Mexican and Brazilian parts (where the vans were still produced until 2013!) propped up the market.

I’d venture to say these early models were the most reliable of all the campers, but they had issues with horsepower, wiring and eventually rust.

The holy grail in this class, known as “Type 2” vans, is the 21-window model sold in the mid-1960s. It’s an icon, and you can find restorations that have sold for more than $300,000.

The next generation of VW campers are generally known as “Vanagons,” or Type 3s. They come in all shapes and sizes and are the most popular version among today’s #VanLife enthusiasts. Most of the early-model interior features remained in these campers, which were marketed in the U.S. from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, including the rear-engine placement, the pop-tops and the stove/fridge setup.

But some even cooler features evolved. The front seats swiveled backward to create more of a living room feel when parked. Some had air conditioning. (Progress!) An optional water-cooled engine was introduced, along with a diesel variety. Others had off-road capabilities. The four-wheel-drive Syncro model is considered the ultimate Vanagon. You’d be lucky to find one in the Bay Area for less than $30,000. Some fetch around $60,000, or even more, depending on the customization.

The Vanagons’ weakness centers on leaky coolant and fuel lines, the latter of which can burn the whole dream down. Own one of these vans, and you’ll get to know your mechanic real well.

The final incarnation of the VW bus in the U.S. came in 1993, known as the Eurovan. This is the least hip of all VW campers, by far, but it also comes with more modern features and somewhat better reliability. VW moved the engine to the front on this model. It came as a standard passenger van or a poptop “Weekender” version, along with the full-blown camper style.

The Eurovans (a.k.a. Type 4 and later, Type 5) came with five- and six-cylinder engines, both very reliable. The transmissions proved to be this make’s Achilles’ heel. EV owners spend their days worrying about overheated gearboxes like parents worry about their kids crossing the street.

Due to regulatory changes, and a soft market for the Eurovan, VW stopped importing any type of camper van to America back in 2003. That’s made these vehicles hard to find and made #VanLife #RealExpensive.

So, what have we learned from this drive down memory lane? Let me share my own #RealVanLife.

I have a ’93 EV Weekender with about 150,000 miles on it. I use it for camping, day trips and shuttling the family around. My bulldog, Cookie, loves the roomy living room in the back, watching the

road roll by from the couch. This is a relatively new acquisition, so I’m still getting to know her and haven’t even come up with a proper name yet. (Camper owners love catchy names like “Vincent Van Go” or “Van Morrison.”)

Over the years, I’ve traveled thousands of miles in a variety of VW campers. I had that first ’71 pop-top. Then there was the ’72 tin top (a camper with no poptop). My wife and I drove it from New York City to San Francisco when we immigrated to California in the mid-1990s. We drove it for a few years, but then it was time to move on.

I took a long break from my addiction, then returned to buy a ’93 Eurovan Weekender a few years back. It was a sweet ride and I thought I had found a long-term solution … until it was totaled in a crash.

If I had any brains, I would’ve taken the insurance money, marched over to the Honda dealership and bought a nice, reliable minivan. Instead, I tracked down a beautiful ’93 Weekender in Southern California last summer, same make and model as the one I’d just lost.

I flew to Burbank, on a one-way ticket, and drove her home to the Bay Area. The transmission blew up a few days later, and I spent months tracking down a replacement, which ended up being a reliable, manual conversion. It was so VW. I still drive with my fingers crossed.

Over all those years and campers, I traveled the East Coast and the Grateful Dead circuit to some extent. I spent the most time in the vast spaces of the West, crawling over Loveland Pass in Colorado, venturing to the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. I’ll never forget the Country Fair in Oregon, or Cougar Reservoir’s hot springs, outside of Eugene. We slept under bridges in Big Sur and cruised over Donner Pass on the way to San Francisco.

I’ll also never forget losing my brakes roaring downhill in Boulder, Colo. Or the time someone tried to steal my dual-carbs in Juarez, Mexico. The time my clutch cable snapped in the Berkeley hills. The time I pumped diesel gas into my van during a sandstorm in Las Cruces, N.M. Or the leaky fuel pump that kept me nervous company on a drive from

Phoenix to Denver. It’s all part of the experience, and VW veterans know it well.

My favorite trip happened back in 1993, after college graduation. I wandered the country for months with a rotating cast of friends, ending up on the Baja Peninsula, on a beach near the town of Mulege. I have no idea how long we spent there, but it felt like forever, filling the fridge with blocks of hielo, drinking Pacificos and swimming in the warm waters of the Gulf of California.

I eventually grew homesick, packed up the bus and started the long drive back to New York City, where I started my #reallife. Sitting at a variety of desk jobs over the years, my mind sometimes drifts back to that sandy, dusty Baja beach, where there was no time or responsibility. Just us. And, to this day, I find time to take my current camper out for short stints on the road, finding the perfect riverbank or a shady campsite with a view, recapturing tiny slivers of that freedom.

That’s my #vanlife, people.

Owning a VW van can be rewarding and maddening at the same time. It’s an up-anddown experience. But there’s help if you get addicted. The actual community of VW enthusiasts out there who drive campers is a pretty neat group. They’re in constant conversation on the internet, helping each other find parts and arguing over what makes the best engine conversion. They get together at festivals and meet-ups to show off their vans.

It can be a wonky group, with some members who are true mechanical maestros (not me), and others who know enough to get by with the help of a real wrench (that’s me). We share pictures of our vans getting towed on Facebook and share the laughter and tears. We gossip about mechanics and parts dealers. We geek out over what tires to run, or whether we need a transmission cooler. It’s a fun group to be a part of, but it doesn’t resemble the manicured, sexed-up version you see on Instagram.

If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t need a $40,000 Syncro to experience it. If you just want to hit the road, be free and drink in life … it’s the attitude, not the wheels.

Al Saracevic is the sports editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: asaracevic@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @alsaracevic

Chronicle Sports Editor Al Saracevic has owned a number of Volkswagen campers, dating back to his college days at Rutgers in New Jersey. His first van, a 1971 VWpop-top, is at left in full tailgate mode at a Scarlet Knights football game. His second camper, a ’72 Westfalia tin-top, took him to Mexico in 1993.

Years later, Saracevic graduated to more modern versions of the classic VW camper. Here is his ’93 Westfalia Weekender, at left, parked on the California coast near Jenner. It features two beds and a foldout table. Of course, no camping expedition these days would be complete without his trusted companion, Cookie the bulldog.

Photos courtesy Al Saracevic