FORT FISHER – Three generations of the Zwart family relax and play on the beach. Ranging in age from 6 to 96, they have come hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of miles to be here.
“It’s obviously very beautiful, and also you have space,” John Zwart said, looking around. Zwart, a native of the Netherlands, still speaks will a heavy Dutch accent.
But he sounds quite at home when he says, “It’s a special place.”
Technically, Zwart came to the area because of General Electric. An engineer by trade, Zwart works with equipment used to test jet engines; he travels the nation – from San Francisco to Wilmington – for his job. But there’s much more to the story than just a work trip.
Zwart has been to the area many times, but this year he has brought his entire family, including his mother, Thea, in a renovated city bus named “Dory.” Along with his wife Smita Bharti, and his daughters Tanya and Leena, Zwart has returned to the Carolina Beach area for good reasons.
“Our dog Rosy, can run free which is nice,” Zwart said, “and there is room to park our bus. And natural beauty, of course, at the (Carolina Beach) state park.”
This year, Zwart has a new reason to love the beach at Fort Fisher. His mother, who loves the view of the ocean, requires a wheelchair and usually can’t make it onto the beach. But the all-terrain beach wheelchairs available at Fort Fisher and Carolina Beach make it easy for the family to stick together.
For Zwart and his family’s, that’s important.
On the road
Zwart and Bharti had already traveled far and wide before meeting each other in school at State College in the 1990s. The two are humble and self-depreciating, but if you nudge gently, stories tumble out.
“We met at a coffee shop, it was nothing special,” Bharti said.
“I thought it was pretty special,” Zwart said. “I mean, what are the odds?”
“Ok. It was pretty special — they actually provided the coffee at our wedding,” Bharti said. “It’s still there. We still go there.”
After getting married, but years before “Dory,” Zwart and Bharti developed a tradition of traveling in modified vehicles. Zwart modified an ambulance and later a short school bus, traveling around the country – powered by vegetable oil.
“We traveled from State College to Miami, then to El Paso – we essentially drove from Taco Bell to Taco Bell,” Zwart said.
Zwart added, as a tip of the trade, that they avoided Taco Bell’s that were paired with KFC, because those establishments didn’t have the same quality of oil.
After several years of travel, Zwart’s mother Thea – who was living in the Netherlands – started developing memory issues. Zwart’s family had to consider putting Thea in a home. But that’s not what Thea wanted.
It wasn’t what Zwart wanted, either.
“Thankfully, wife believes, you know, that people are better and more useful when they’re together,” Zwart said.
Szwart and Bharti decided they wanted to bring Thea to the United States, but didn’t want to give up their road trips. His idea? Find a way to take the whole family on the road.
“Because I don’t have any family in the country, and neither does my wife, another reason to have my mother here is our daughters, who were born here — so they don’t think Smita and I are the only people in the world. This was they know they come from somewhere,” Zwart said.
Finding Dory, and learning to drive it
Zwart found a used bus from High Point, North Carolina at auction (Zwart and Bharti are fond of the city and its restaurants). Though it needed a lot of work, Zwart – who was already a member of a bus-overhauling forum online – was up to the challenged. The bus ran, and importantly the wheel-chair accessible ramp worked. Everything else he could fix or replace.
The only problem: Zwart had no idea how to drive it.
So, Zwart rode on the State College bus line, hoping to pick up pointers.
“There was one old-timer – he was really cool – he let me ride behind him and watch. He showed me, you know, this button does thing, you have to pull this lever to do that,” Zwart said.
The bus driver and some his co-workers invited Szwart the depot for a driving lesson. The test? Park his bus between two new State College buses, which ran about $600,000 each. Zwart had spent about $5,000 on his.
“I asked them, ‘you want me to park my bus between those?’ They said, ‘it’s your bus, it’s your insurance.’ So, I tried to put it in drive and nothing happened,” Zwart said. “There were these two guys, standing there, grinning at me, kind of laughing.”
But, after a minute, Zwart remembers the driver who’d mentored him saying the bus would automatically shut off if it idled for too long. He got the bus running again and parked it, more or less between the other two buses.
“They were clapping, so that felt good,” Zwart said.
Since the fuel gauge on the bus was broken, Zwart’s next stop was to get gas. He promptly bottomed out – learning the hard way that “you can’t go everywhere you want, so you have to find the right way to go.”
Since then, Zwart and Bharti have had the bus for about nine months, exploring its complicated design and testing its limits with an engineer’s restrained confidence. He’s continued to modify the bus, ripping out seats and building bunks and a fold-out coach into the frame.
He’s also added a temporary “Porta-Potty,” and plans to convert that into a fully functioning restroom. The bus has solar panels – purchased on another of Zwart and Bharti’s fryer-oil powered adventures – which produce enough voltage to run a stovetop and a microwave.
One thing Zwart hasn’t changed is the bus’s blue paint job (new paint jobs for a bus can run between $4,000 and $15,000). In the end, that led to the bus’s name, “Dory.”
“So, the bus is going to stay blue, and my daughters both love ‘Finding Nemo,’ and you know Dory is blue, and has memory problems – which helped us explain their grandmother’s issues – and so, the bus is Dory,” Zwart said.
Back to the beach, back on the road
Fort Fisher was a most on the itinerary for the family’s first trip in Dory, though this time, Zwart and his family were only in town for a few days, split between Fort Fisher and Carolina Beach State Park. But he’s already planning the next trip, a true cross-country journey. Zwart and Bharti and considering taking their daughters out of class and home schooling them on a year-long journey.
Fort Fisher will definitely be one of the stops.
“How could it not be?” Zwart said.
Send comments and tips to Benjamin Schachtman at ben@localvoicemedia.com, @pcdben on Twitter, and (910) 538-2001.
