My Favorite Ride: The top down and Tom Petty and the B52s playing on the 8-track

John Owens closes his eyes and travels back in time to the early 1990s, conjuring up memories of the family driving south on Ind. 37 toward their weekend cabin on the White River in Lawrence County.

His dad behind the wheel of a bright-yellow 1973 Volkswagen Thing. His mom in the passenger seat, singing along to whatever was playing on the 8-track.

Tom Petty and the B-52s, Owens recalled. "Good love is hard to find, you got lucky, babe, you got lucky, babe, when I found you ...” And, "If you see a faded sign at the side of the road that says 15 miles to the love shack ..."

And this recollection comes to Owens like it was yesterday. "We would ride with the top down," Owens said, "and my sister's hair would whip me in the face like periodic bee stings."

Childhood memories such as these stick with us always. For me, the sight of an empty steel vegetable can takes me right back to the creek behind my grandparent's house in Allen County, Kentucky, where my cousins and I spent hot afternoons catching crawdads found by gently lifting the flat rocks beneath our bare feet.

But this column is about automobiles, not nostalgia, although I suppose the two sometimes intertwine, like when Owens saw last month's My Favorite Ride that featured a 1973 military-style Thing taken in on trade at Royal Chevrolet more than 25 years ago. Car dealership owner Charlie Royal, who died last month, kept the auto parked in a storage building near Ellettsville all that time.

My Favorite Ride:What in the world is that Thing?

The Royal family contracted with Tim Lloyd to bring the Thing back to life, and I wrote about it after taking a ride in the refurbished vehicle. But where had it come from?

"Lloyd doesn't know who traded the Thing in at the dealership," I wrote in July. "It was someone local, because he remembers seeing the lemon-colored vehicle parked around the IU campus in the early 1990s. There's a mechanic's sticker from Newt's Marathon on the frame, indicating the VW had been serviced there in 1991."

I heard from John Owens on the Saturday the column appeared in The Herald-Times online edition. He solved the mystery for us.

"My father was the owner that traded in the Thing car. I have some fond memories riding in that thing," he wrote in an email describing his history with the vehicle.

"He traded it in to Royal in the mid '90s. At first they didn't want to accept it, but Charlie Royal saw the vehicle and decided to accept it as a collector car. It was traded in by him as down payment for an Oldsmobile Bravada for my mom. Not exactly a 1-for1 trade, looking back."

More My Favorite Ride:Almost 40 years ago, 16-year-old Mike Boyd bought his 1964 GTO for $800

His father worked as a maintenance man at IU's McNutt Quad, which explains why Lloyd saw the Thing parked around campus.

"He would pick up my mom from the IU library where she worked and go out to lunch," he said. "The Newt's Marathon sticker kicked up a lot of memories too. My sister and I loved that they had the rope across the pumps that would trigger a bell for service whenever a car would drive over it."

He described driving down the the highway headed for the river cabin, his sister's long hair blowing in his face. He kept thinking about those days, and of his father.

"If Tim Lloyd is interested in parting with it, I've got a low mileage 2010 Toyota Matrix and some cash," Owens said. "My father has since passed, and it would be cool to get that back with the family."

Lloyd doesn't own the car, but he's passed on the trade offer to the family that does. We'll see what happens.

Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.