Oconomowoc’s most famous Mini
One of Oconomowoc’s favorite daughters celebrated July 4 in style in New Berlin this year. Who? Bessie.
Bessie is a 2002 Mini Cooper who calls Oconomowoc home. She travels all over the nation representing her own bad self as well as the City of 1000 O’s. She Motors. She’s a car. She has a blog called “The adventures of Bessie the Mini.”
We had a short conversation with Bessie’s owner and Ghostwriter and chief car-warsher Caren Pilgrim a few weeks back. Said Caren:
“Bessie was ordered on my birthday in November of 2002. I had been looking at buying a Mini since about 1999, but as a poor college student it was really just pipe dreams. But out of college with a couple pitiful jobs and a set of loving parents with money to loan, I was able to order the car of my budgeted dreams. About a month and a half of exhaustive waiting, she arrived.
“Bessie was a celebrity of sorts for a while. People would walk up to me and ask me “what is that?” And what celebrity doesn’t have a fan page?
“The site went up after a Road Trip down to Texas and back. Owning a MINI really inspired the trip. Who goes from Wisconsin to Texas with three girls in two days and all our luggage in a little, British sports car? We did. It was great! No boring vacation photos website for us. We’ve got the Adventures of Bessie the MINI.
“Now, I don’t really write from the perspective of Bessie. I’m more of her scribe, since she’s a simple machine with a small vocal vocabulary and prefers to evoke emotion with her performance. I almost wish I too could stop using words as I’m running out of ways to say ‘Bessie drove us to ___.’”
Pilgrim suggests that the most inspiring of Bessie’s adventures are the Ice Cream Escapades.“This is not surprising as everybody loves ice cream,” she said.
We promise, Ocono.com is not turning into a car blog.
