Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for August 15, 2023

I’m happy they enjoyed themselves… but it sounds like the van was a nightmare.

Will we hear more details about any of their misadventures or will their listing them today be it?

Perfectly insane

The shared disaster memories are what make it perfect.

I get the impression that since they are naming all their little adventure instead of showing us them we are not going to see any of them. So their epic road trip, like the epic pool party will be forgotten with the start of another sophomore school year.

Gun and bets aren’t looking at the mishaps as bad things but learning experiences and as time spent together.

They’re happy. What more do you want?

What didn’t kill them, made them stronger.

It’s what they are NOT talking about is what REALLY happened! ;)

great attitude actually

Why do I get the feeling that this is the most well hear of these exciting adventures? Well at least we got to watch Tiffany leer at Kip for weeks on end while never making a move, right?

Apparently none of the friends of Bets and Gunther watch her constant streaming. Shouldn’t everybody already know all about their adventures?

In our travels, I’ve learned that trips are a series of adventures and misadventures. It’s how you handle both to make the trip memorable, or bad,

This sounds like a situation that i like to call “pulling a Charlie Chaplin”. You try to extract yourself from a problem but you just keep on digging yourself deeper and deeper.;-D

As long as no one got hurt it’s all good.

Oh Gee! I’m so excited. Pray tell what wonders you encountered in your many and diverse travels. I can hardly wait.

But more than likely we will have to wait as the story drags on.

I wanna hear bout the ravioli fiasco. Not enough sauce? No Parmesan? What on earth happened??

I want to hear about the ravioli fiasco, too! For Greg to throw out a line like that and not follow it up would be pure sadism.

The whole thing is undoubtably on Bets’ Facebook page.

Les wraps it up in a few words by saying Not hearin a lot of perfect guys as Les only can do.

Sounds perfect to me.

Like my younger brother’s trip to the Olympic Peninsula many years ago with a 1959 Vauxhall. Torrential rains (normal for that region) and the windshield wipers quit. And other things.

…. and that were only the first four days.

The takeaway here is that Bets and Survived their little “misadventure.”

And it’s something they’ll fondly remember for the rest of their lives.

THEY actually DID something together as opposed to peeking at houseguests or busting suds at a menial, thankless low paying job.

And just what did YOU do during your Summer vacation, Mr. Leslie?

Surviving misadventures provides a set of memories shared by Bets Malone and Gunther Berger?

Does Gunther have the resources to fix Van?

Right, Mr. and Mrs. Evans, we kinda get it: The punchline on Saturday will be that there won’t actually be any flashbacks, so the joke will be on us. End of story arc, next arc begins on Monday.

Any chance they eloped while in Vegas?

Well, if it were me, I’d dump the whole road trip and go home early. Having a reliable transportation is the key to an enjoyable experience. I am curious as to why they think engine failures were fun. Happened to me once. Happened on the road twice on one road trip. The first one, our camper van (they were popular back in my time, 1983. It was a VW Bus) broke down in middle of I-95 in Florida. The owner babied the van until we reached the home of a friend of his. We stayed there for 2 days while the owner and other guys took the engine out of the VW and re-built it. I had to sleep on the floor. Although I was 18, my body hurt when I slept on the floor. Then we were back on the road…until Mississippi. It died again in the middle of I-10. We pushed it to the grassy median between the western direction and the eastern direction. Once again, they quickly took the engine out and tweaked with that faulty part and put it back just in time before it got dark…we had to pee behind those big Mississippi willow trees on the banks of the freeway – yeah. We had to run across 4 lanes. One of us was nearly bitten by a snapping turtle and discovered there was a river that ran alongside the freeway. Then the pouring rain came. The humidity was crazy. We all were cranky, tired, hungry. When we got back into the van, all we wanted to do was sleep despite that we were hungry. The rest of the trip to California was smooth sailing. We stopped at many destination places and had a good time. I guess the second tweak on the engine did it. The VW Bus guy still had the van right until he died. His son now is the owner.

“Put them through hell together and they’ll bond.”

How cute they are! A little burned, but happy as they’ve ever been before. Whatever Irma’s intention was, the result is wonderful. It’s good to see Bets and Gunther like this. Laughing at things that only they can understand, happy to have had that adventure together. Les has lost them, they are in the Happy Couples World. But I would like to know at least some details about their Comic Con stop.

And we got three weeks of Tiff’s thirst for Kip instead of any of that.

“Those guys who made Gunther squeal like a pig.”

Les it’s the random weird/funny moments and the little hardships which bring u closer that make a vacation perfect.

Also any one of these stories would have been way more fun than watching Luann and Bernice sit in Tiff’s bedroom and talk abt someone else’s boyfriend

That’s less of a joke and more Lez simply not being able to comprehend that as disasterous as the trip clearly was.. their happy. I never thought i’d see them as an actually happy functioning couple but here we are.

How you deal with adversity says more about your character than how you deal with success.

(Although, if success turn you into a smug pain in the a$$, that says a great deal about your character.)

You laugh with your friend because you survived through it all.

They have kept a wonderful outlook on all the misadventures. Bravo!

Car repairs can take awhile, and be costly. What will they do?

This reminds me of “The Great Western Trip” my family went on when I was a kid. We went on camping trips every summer, all over. That trip was nothing but car trouble, flat tires, and running out of gas. It’s the only trip we still talk about much.

They were together and faced it all together as a team for them to overcome it all it was perfect!

If they can be that happy together after all of the mishaps they experienced on the road, then they will make it in the long term. Way to go Gunther, finding the woman of your dreams! :-))

Such an excursion would either be a great bonding experience – or the death knell of the relationship. Evidently it was the former. they are better-matched than Mr. Gray hopes. Bets is probably up to almost any challenge- she has her flaws, but she’s gutsy – and hot. Gunther has a winner.

It’s an adventure as long as they have a home to come home to. Now if the van WAS their home? – yeah, it would be a total disaster and they’d end up living in a shelter or on the streets.

They’ve apparently bonded over multiple mini tragedies.

Condom broke, he hehe, hahaha.

The perfect was the being together and sharing the common issues to be worked through.

If these two are not engaged by the end of the year. there is something wrong.

Read (Listen) between the lines, buddy.

Now back to Failure to Launch.

One presumes that the mechanical problems of the van, weren’t the real reason why the trip was great. Bets will be filling her girlfriends in some detail in the very near future. We won’t be hearing it.

Shared experiences Les.

The “perfect” part was that they were doing it together. :-)

Sounds like those two had a blast

i dunno. too happy.

I can’t tell if they really enjoyed themselves, or if they’re being sarcastic and putting on a show for other people. It’s that “ha ha ha” that throws me off.Wouldn’t it be great, though, if this was all a test by Gunther’s mom to see how strong their feelings really are for each other?

I get this strip. Some of my best road trip memories were overcoming obstacles. I had the clutch cable go out on my 78 Fairmont when I was in Georgia on my way home to Michigan. The only thing I could find was a hardware store, so I bought some wire cable, a few swages, and rigged a cable from the clutch lever through a grommet I removed from the firewall. Then I clamped a vice grip onto the cable and pulled on that when I wanted to shift gears. Well, sometimes, I could just shift by ear and skip the clutch… Same vehicle, had the carb ice up because the carb heat vacuum actuator failed. I hiked to a local general store, bought a roll of toilet paper, stripped the paper off the roll and put the paper tube into the duct to get heat to the carb. OK, my fuel economy went down because the carb was now overheated, but I got home and drove around for a week or two until I could get a replacement part. That stuff seemed like trials and tribulations right at the moment, but now they are warm and fuzzy memories of a time when I didn’t have as much, but could perservere.

Wait for it………….

We could have seen the road trip, instead we were treated with a few weeks of obsessing over Kip from Tiffany’s bedroom.

So they had all of these interesting things happen to them, and we’re stuck watching a pool party not happen while Bernice is being her usual pain in the butt self. And now, maybe, if we’re lucky, hear past-tense snippets of the trip. Great.

I agree with Les. That doesn’t sound Perfect at all. It sounds like they enjoyed whatever happened, but Perfect is Not the correct word to describe it.

“when we look back years from now we’ll laugh about this”thats life isn’t it?

“It broke down in the WalMart parking lot a mile down the road! So we locked the doors and spent a week wearing out air matresses!”

I wonder if Gunther got his ashes hauled.

Sounds like quite the adventure. Sure am glad we got weeks of Tiff ruminating over her crush on Kip and a non-existant pool party instead.

At least it brought them closer together instead of breaking them up.

hmm … is anybody “calling it?”

Looks like these are stories they will be telling their kids someday.

I wish to know more about the Ravioli Fiasco!

I didn’t follow the Luann.com on the adventures, and I need to inquire how I can, but I knew this would be a trip where all the wacky, crazy things will be remembered, surrounded by our gorgeous country. I’m not one who believes that Irma did this to break the two up, I think that’s just projection for those wish them broken up for whaever reason; quite the contrary, she recognizes how much they love each other and likely will remain together, I think even old Wiseguy Al will be cool with it. What happens now? Waiting is always wise with this strip, to avoid projection prediction error.

relationship building/strengthening experience….AND, depending on their destinations….possibly no internet for Bets to be all up in her posts.

After Tiffany’s “epic” pool party and Bernice’s exciting bathing ensemble, I can’t wait to see the garage’s famous grease monkey in action.

This would’ve made for a much more entertaining series of strips than “Tiffany contemplates flirting with Kip, feels to guilty to speak more than a couple sentences and watch him from afar, then talks about the things she won’t do to characters with somehow even LESS going on than her. With the predictable result of nothing actually happening.”

Also after Bets spent so long being kind of an entitled hypocrite (insisting she live the way she insulted Tiffany for living except Tiffany had permission and didn’t gloat about it on social media) it might have been nice to show a more positive side to her by showing the trip and giving her and Gunther some on panel moments showing that they’re good together (since recently we saw them getting sick of spending too much time together cloistered up in the gulag.)

And all the dope they smoked from the sound of it. And as we all know, out Dearest Ann❤️Eiffel tells us ALL to Just Say No to Drugs. Well, maybe the occasional roofie but let’s not go there. And Yrs Trly, The Count, whole heated concurs and agrees! Drugs are a Bozo No No, boy howdy. But as far as Betts… as soon as she eats nine Milky Way bars, sleeps for 12 hours and wakes up with a taste in her mouth like someone took a dump in it… and takes a long hot shower and a bubble bath with the vanilla lavender bath bomb… she can QFA (Quit Fooling ;) Around), pack the string thong bikini and micro mini little black dress and hook up with Sexy❤️Luann and Tuff❤️Tiff, hop on the Windstar II, The Flying Shoog Daddy (formerly owned by Tiff’s Shoog Daddy Daddy), and jet off to join Exotic Ann❤️Eiffel and the other ❤️Eiffeletts Stalking the Wild Shoog Daddy wherever they may be. One thing for sure, Savvy Ann❤️Eiffel knows fer sure, Brah. What? What’s this you ask? Dumpster? He’s off to skinny dip with Dippy Skippy…Yippie!! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And a good time is had by all!. Woo Hoo! The Count ❤️s it when a plan comes together and it’s all because of the Gracious Unselfishness of… you guessed it…Dearest Ann❤️Eiffel. No wonder we ALL ❤️ Ann❤️Eiffel! Gotta run, hon. Bizzy Day for The Count. Let’s be safe out there, lowly unnworthies. TTFN… Count…OUT!

At least they are able to laugh about. Doesn’t seem to bother them.

The “ravioli fiasco”? Was this, in fact, a Noodle Incident?

tried cooking ravioli in the can without venting it?

Those are the things that made it perfect!

“An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” — G. K. Chesterton.

The best stories come from the challenges – and even disasters – that happen along the way…if everything went perfect, there’d be nothing to talk about

They had fun doing it all!

from a wayback machine..

> Truckin’, got my chips cashed in

> Keep truckin’, like the do-dah man

> Together, more or less in line

> Just keep truckin’ on..

Perfection redefined.

considering what they paid for the van (in spite of Brad and Toni’s advice and guidance), this seems totally predictable

Was this the van that Gunther’s mother suggested to Bets that they buy? Is this also a van that was inspected by Toni and given her nod of approval before buying?

I like their attitudes. If they can get through all that and still be smiling, there’s hope for this relationship. Perhaps they’ll share the adventures with Irma and Al……and us?

Hope they fix it and do it again. Wanna bet second time around is perfect therefore Boring

I had a Vanagon in college it was a nightmare in upkeep & kept running out of gas because the fuel gauge was always all over the place… but it was a fun vehicle otherwise to go over the hill to Santa Cruz’s beaches with the girls I was dating…

If anyone was trying to get rid of Bets or pull her away from Guth I think they made things worse, these two are as thick as theives.

So, they’re back. What will be their living arrangments?

These kids needed some time to themselves, away from parents, roommates, and big city lights.So what if the VW was a big pile of sh-aving cream? This gave them some good stories and great laughs, at least in hindsight. That’s livin’ life.

Les didn’t even follow them on social media. Pretty smart of him.

Maybe all these crises “brought them closer together”.

Calamity brings people together. ❤

What a great pair. Able to laugh at past adversity.

Yes! It was an experience they shared that they will never forget. Some good, some not so good, probably some scary, but they did it together and lived through it. Memories were made, bonds were forged, in the end life was good. Hooray for them!!

An “imperfect trip” is one without any adventures.

When I want a boring trip, I make sure to take my best camera along. If I leave it at home, I’m sure to collide with sasquatch, be buzzed by UFOs, and intimidated by black helicopters. :)

When you’re with the right person, even the worst vacation is perfect!

You weren’t there with someone you loved.

Wait, I thought they were going to LIVE in that vehicle. Where’s she going to live now? I guess they won’t be living together for now…

Actually, I really am…..

Makes Les glad he stayed home for the summer. Might even have had a chance at Tiffany if she weren’t hung up on Lip. Believe it or not, I’m ready for fall.

More fun than I could handle!

Ah, yes, what’s a road trip without a passel of “adventures,” “mis” or not. It’s all wonderful when you’re with someone you love. (sigh)

Did anyone else get emails from Greg with their adventures? I only remember the comic con one

Where’s Bets phone? Anyone notice?

Leslie Knox is just too literal-minded and cynical to see or care how marvelously happy Gunny and Bets are together now. Their roadtrip, whatever its misadventures (and there seem to have been an abundance of them), has been, for them, a success and has brought them closer to each other.

Bravo, Gunther and Bets!