The Bus Saga Part 1: The Admission Price of Adventure

Warning: this is a pretty long newsletter. It’s quite the story and per usual, there is a lesson at the end!

For anyone who knows me personally, you know that I have a proclivity for making my life… interesting. By that, I mean that if things aren’t “interesting enough” I find a way to infuse chaos into my life (much to my Mother’s dismay).

This week’s chaos was a particularly fun adventure: buying a bus.

A little backstory

About a year and a half ago, around the time that I was finalizing my decision to leave teaching, I decided I wanted to convert a school bus into a home on wheels (called a Skoolie), driven by the allure of freedom. I had been toying with the idea of a mobile dwelling (tiny house, RV, Skoolie, etc.) for several years, even going as far as coming tantalizingly close to purchasing a 35’ tow-behind.

After ultimately deciding on a Skoolie, I watched countless hours of videos on YouTube and other social media, read dozens of articles and forums, and sketched out my plans for the bus in great detail.

Over the course of a year, I wove together fragments of the build, taking inspiration from my research and carefully selecting the unique set of features for my perfect bus. I laid out the floor plan, interior design, finishes, all of it. I visualized it almost every night before bed and could mentally walk the bus from nose to tail.

It’s going to have a garage on the back, a side deck with a latching and unfolding mechanism I designed myself, a desk area that also converts into a Murphy bed, functional kitchen, the works.

A few months ago, around the time that my dad passed away, I shared this plan with my older brother who eagerly jumped on board.

(Side note: the two of us are both dreamers and should not be left unsupervised)

He was excited about the project and together we hatched a plan: I would get the bus and the materials, he would handle the labor of the conversion. In exchange, the two of us plus his family of four, would take the trip on a grand adventure to Alaska this summer!

All we needed was a bus. (And apparently adult supervision)

The Bus

For about a year I’d proudly announced that a bus would be my 30th birthday present. While I didn’t buy it on my actual birthday, this weekend I was finally able to pull the trigger.

Buses, as you can imagine, aren’t quite as easy to come by as a regular car or van. There are lots of considerations and complications that can come up, and diesel engines are trickier to deal with than traditional. Just like cars, buses come in all shapes, sizes, models, engines, transmissions, brake systems, internal height, and more.

I knew that I wanted a front engine flat nose with an interior length of at least 35’ to maximize the living space and allow for a “garage” on the back. I read about all different kinds of engines and transmissions, ideal model years, mileage, all of it.

My brother and I sent buses back and forth for weeks, looking mostly on Marketplace and Skoolie groups on Facebook.

A week and a half ago, we came across a bus that piqued both of our interests: a 40’ 2005 Thomas built school bus.

We contacted the seller and the more we learned about the bus, the more it ticked all of our boxes.

The owner intended to use it for a Skoolie as well but life changed his plans. He’d already gutted it and removed all the seats. This alone takes about 60 hours of hard labor!

It also had a professionally done 14” roof raise. This is HUGE in the Skoolie world. Most school buses have an interior height of about 77“ (6’5”), some even less, which can make it feel cramped, especially for taller guests. Since I’m only about 5’5” a regular roof would be fine for me, but tight for anyone much taller, so an extra 14” makes an incredible difference.

We loved the idea of a roof raise. We considered doing it ourselves, but the job is beyond our personal capabilities. You essentially have to saw off the entire roof at one time and jack it up simultaneously, not to mention the welding skills necessary to get it all back together safely.

So, having a roof raise already was a huge selling point.

The bus also has a stellar transmission, a great engine, and only 50,000 miles on it.

All in all, it was a diamond in the rough. The clear winner against dozens of buses I’d found across the nation.

And so, I decided to fly up to Memphis, TN to check out the bus.

I bought my plane ticket at around 1PM on Wednesday and was at the airport by 2:30 for my flight at 3:30. I forgot to pack my contact case and toothpaste and only packed a few pairs of sweatpants and socks. Thankfully, I made it to Memphis safely…just in time for an incoming winter storm (more on that later).

Thursday

Now is where the story starts getting fun.

I was about 30 minutes north of where the bus was located. My brother was driving three and a half hours from southern Illinois to scoop me up and go look at the bus together.

After checking out and test driving the bus, we felt confident about the decision. We shook hands with the seller, feeling good (albeit a little sick to my stomach about spending more money than I ever have so far in my life, but it’s just money, right?).

During the comical test drive, I had a bit of a rough time figuring out the brakes and sent both my brother and the 6’5” seller lurching forward a few times, but eventually I got over the learning curve sufficiently enough to start the drive north. The plan was to take it to my brother’s house where we would work on the bus. Once completed, the bus would make its way to Florida for a few short adventures in preparation for Alaska.

Everything seemed to be going according to plan with one exception: the bus would not get above 50 mph on the highway. Not ideal, but we were above the designated minimum speed. We’d noted this with the seller and figured that since the bus had been sitting for about a year, it just needed to warm up and work through some of the old fuel that had been in the tank.

Somewhere about 80 miles into our journey, around Turrell, Arkansas, the bus suddenly dropped from a comfortable 45 to 15. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t go any faster. I did the only thing I knew to do and pulled over on the highway.

There was a small shoulder, only a couple feet wide. Slightly panicked, I had to carefully pull it out of traffic and came dangerously close to the edge of the steep ditch to our right.

After reassessing with my brother, we decided we couldn’t stay here. The highway was busy, and I mean BUSY. Hundreds of cars and semis were flying past us at 75 mph.

Every second we stayed on the shoulder, we were putting ourselves, and the bus, at risk.

Thankfully there was an exit right a few hundred feet from where we broke down and once we got a sufficient clearing of traffic, we drove the bus into the space between the forward highway and exit ramp. It was both wide enough and long enough for the bus and my brother’s car to park, safely out of reach of traffic.

Did I mention yet that this was when we discovered the bus had no emergency flashers because the previous owner had disconnected the wiring in the initial gutting of the bus?

My brother has a rugged intelligence that far exceeds mine, and his knowledge has proved immensely valuable in multiple situations on our crazy adventures. However, we were both out of our depths and we knew it.

Between the two of us, we started trying to figure out what to do. He began making dozens of calls, hoping to find a tow truck to get us out of the road. Through my Googling and research, and talking to the mechanic who was familiar with the bus, we were able to determine that the most likely issue was fuel starvation (a new situation for me).

Essentially, our bus had a heart attack.

What we didn’t know at the time is that diesel fuel becomes like a sludge as it sits. This bus had been sitting unused for over a year, meaning gummy old diesel was slopping around at the bottom of our tank. When the previous owner put new diesel on top of the old, he made a big slurry of diesel gunk that had clogged the fuel filters and pump.

(I do want to be clear that I don’t fault the seller for this. He put new diesel into the tank out of the kindness of his heart intending to send us on our way with a full tank. We wouldn’t have known to drain the tank first and would have undoubtedly inflicted the same situation on ourselves.)

With this information, we were able to connect with a local diesel truck repair shop who offered roadside assistance and they dispatched a mechanic to come look at the bus. About an hour later, Bubba showed up to assess the situation.

Bubba is about 5’7, missing more teeth than he has, and was covered in grease from head to toe. When he got out, smoking a cigarette complete with an ash cap at least four inches, he got to work. He agreed we needed to change the fuel filters and left to get the new ones, returning another hour later to replace them.

By this point, we’d been sitting on the side of the highway for about 4 hours. The sun had set and the cold wind announcing the impending arrival of a winter storm chilled us to our cores. The mechanic was able to get the filters replaced and $800 later, we were good to go.

In a stroke of foresight, we asked the mechanic to follow us to a gas station within view just off the exit so that if there were any continuing issues, we were at least safely off the highway and could reassess in safety.

We fired up the rig, encouraged by the renewed purr of the engine, agreed on the game plan and set off.

I got the bus rolling and onto the exit ramp, ready to see what power this breath of fresh fuel air gave to the bus.

As I rolled into the road and tried to accelerate, the bus refused.

It was crawling at about 10 mph.

This was a busy exit, leading to a connecting major highway. Within seconds we had a line of cars behind us and semi trucks angrily blaring their horns. What was worse is that we had no safe place to pull over. We were on a sharp curve, there was no shoulder, and the ditch on either side was a 10 ft steep decline.

We were stuck crawling on this ramp.

I tried to pull the bus as far over as I could and stay safely on the road, prompting 60’ semis to roar past me on the left, throwing up grass and rocks as they blew past in the grass on the other side.

It was terrifying, but there was nothing I could do.

Thankfully, we were able to safely inch the bus to the gas station where the mechanic met us, stumped by why it hadn’t worked. He drove the bus and confirmed something none of us wanted: the issue was in the fuel pump.

We had no other option except to drive the bus to his shop and leave it overnight.

Sandwiched between the mechanic and my brother, we limped the bus 5 miles into the absolute middle of nowhere Arkansas. It is difficult to explain how rural of an area we were in and that drive was one of the longest 5 mile crawls I’ve ever experienced. At one point, I was convinced that the mechanic was bringing us out into a corn field to murder us.

Finally, we arrived at a “shop” that equated to a small house/office on a mud parking lot and a big metal barn.

By this point, it was nearly 9:00, we were exhausted, and all we could do was shake Bubba’s leathery, greasy hand and drive back to Illinois.

After another 3 hours on the highway and some bad Wendy’s, we finally made it home and awaited the next day.

Friday

The plan was to drive back to Arkansas and retrieve the bus. We spoke to the mechanic in the morning who was reasonably confident he’d be finished by 2PM.

Despite the initial optimism, we spent the majority of the day being given the run around by the mechanic’s shop. They weren’t able to tell us how much the part would cost, what was wrong, or any information about how much we were going to be out for the repair or how long it would take.

In one of the conversations, there was a pretty egregious miscommunication and we unknowingly agreed to a $4,000 repair to replace the high pressure fuel pump. The part alone cost $2,800.

If this weren’t bad enough, we decided that towing the bus would be smarter. It was nearly 6:00 by the time the bus was ready, we were still 3.5 hours away, and we had a major winter storm coming in. The weather was predicting upwards of 10” of snowfall in Illinois, and even more snow and ice farther south where the bus was located. It wasn’t feasible to drive down there and get the bus back in the same night, and we really didn’t want to leave the bus on a mud lot in Arkansas during a potential ice storm.

To add to the situation, we were leery of driving the bus back. We weren’t sure if the fuel tank had been drained and, if not, the same issue would have happened another 80 miles up the road and then we would have to replace the fuel pump again and pay for the tow. We also had no working tail lights or blinkers (the headlights worked).

So, the $2,000 to tow the bus back to Carbondale seemed like the smartest move.

One of the joys of dealing with small town America is the nuances of small town America business practices. The mechanic shop refused to take any cards, only CashApp or cash (which we had no way of giving them since the tow truck driver was already on his way there).

We opted for CashApp.

What we didn’t know was that the bank account that had the money for the bus has a daily transaction limit of $2,000. To make matters worse, since it is a small, local bank, their customer service department is only open 9am-3pm Monday-Friday. So when the payment declined, we had no way to contact the bank or get access to the money, and this was the only account any of us had that had the amount of money we needed.

We were at a loss.

We had no way of accessing the money and if we couldn’t pay the mechanic bill, they wouldn’t release the bus. To make matters worse, if we didn’t pay that bill and the tow truck driver drove 3.5 hours and wasn’t able to pick up the bus, we would have been stuck with a $2,000 tow bill and a bus on the mud lot of a pissed off diesel mechanic in rural Arkansas during a winter storm.

Things were not looking good.

I did the only thing I could think of and call everyone and anyone I knew that might have $3,800 in liquid cash who would be willing to send it to me through CashApp until we could get access to the money on Monday.

After about a dozen desperate phone calls and a stressful hour, I was finally able to find a friend able to help out. We got the bill settled just in time for the tow truck to arrive, and the bus made it safely back to Illinois where it is sitting at a local shop, waiting out the storm and being prepared for a full diagnostic inspection to ensure that there are no other mechanical issues.

And so, this story has a somewhat happy ending.

The Lesson

Living an examined life often means figuring out what lessons we can learn from a situation.

Maybe put another way, while there are ample lessons we can learn, we get to decide what lessons we want to learn.

There are endless lessons I could glean from this situation.

• Buying a bus is a money pit and a mistake

• I should have listened to my mother and never done this

• Get a mechanic on site before leaving with a 21 year old vehicle

• Cash is king, especially in rural America

• Stay in my area of expertise and don’t venture out

• Check your bank’s spending limits on your accounts when anticipating large purchases

• Never take a new rig down the highway right away

• Everyone is out to scam me

• Inactivity can be more damaging than overactivity

• The buddy-system is a non-negotiable

• Lifestyle is never as glamorous as portrayed

• Rocky starts are always a bad omen

And the list goes on. At the end of the day, what you decide to learn from what life throws at you determines how you move forward and what the next lesson will be.

It would be easy to sit and sulk about the $17,000 I’ve spent so far on this bus and still don’t have my house on wheels.

Plenty of people would be sick to their stomachs, convinced that this is a mistake that will ultimately lead them to financial ruin and destitution. Starving on the street, begging for food.

Some would be beside themselves, convinced that the world was going to come crashing down because they’d just spent almost all of the money from their modest inheritance on what appears to be a complete waste.

Maybe they’d be right. Maybe this is a huge mistake. A big, hard, expensive lesson in never doing anything like this again.

And if I chose to believe that, you know what would happen?

I would probably never do anything like this ever again.

I’d think twice about spending money because it is a finite resource. I’d be anxious over spending large amounts, afraid of what could happen on the other side. I’d even do the smart things that people like Dave Ramsey would tell me to do, like eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Ramen noodles until I was completely debt-free.

My money would be an anxious companion who never left the nest, afraid to enter the world, and content staying safely inside their cozy savings account earning 1% annual interest.

That money would sit there until I reached some magical threshold where a purchase like a bus “makes sense.” (News flash: that feeling of readiness never comes with anything, especially fear centered financial readiness)

I’d live a life guided by an underlying fear of “losing” something that doesn’t even belong to me.

You see, we tend to believe that money belongs to us. We tell ourselves that we worked for the money, the paycheck is made out to me, and its “mine.” Money becomes a possession that we desperately cling to, petrified of letting it out of our sight because we are afraid that it’ll never come back to us.

That’s why we stockpile money in our bank accounts and have crumbs of experience.

Money becomes our prisoner and we are its miser prison guard.

But by imprisoning money, we really build our own cell. Money, at its root, is energy, and energy does not like to be contained. Refusing to be treated as a captive, money entombs us with the promise of a cask of amontillado of our very own.

I believe that money wants to be our friend, not our jailbird.

And what do friends want?

They want to do things with you.

They want to go to coffee shops and sometimes sit at home watching TV. They want to go out to fun restaurants and sit in a hammock by the ocean.

Friends want to go on boat rides and fly to fun places and do things that don’t make sense. Sure, sometimes you wind up in places you didn’t expect to be, but those situations are always better with a friend.

Friends don’t want to be caged and locked up, and friendship is not based on a fear of one another. What kind of friendship would that be?

Friends want to do things together, to experience life alongside one another through the ups and downs. They want to sit down and laugh about the stupid, crazy, insane things you’ve done together and say “Yeah man, I didn’t know how we’d get out of that but we did.”

Friends don’t want a roster of vanilla stories and nights on the couch eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but they’re just as happy on the couch as they are at a concert.

Real friendships, the ones that last, love the messy parts of life.

They collect stories, not shackles.

And sure, sometimes you piss each other off and yell at the airport, but at the end of the day you stick together because you understand each other like no one else does.

That’s the kind of friend I want in money. One where we laugh and cry together, where we get into messes and help each other out, and one where we don’t let fear get in the way of doing cool shit together.

Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves, and after these last few days I could definitely be telling myself some pretty sulky stories.

Instead, I’m writing a story about me and my best friend, Money, and the crazy, stupid, irrational, wild adventure we just got to have together.

So, I encourage you to look at the money in your bank account. Pull out a $100 bill and look Benny in the face. Would he gaze back at you as a lifelong friend with a wry smile as he reminisces on the crazy stuff you’ve done together, or would he say to you, “Please let me go do something with my life”?

This story has only just begun, and Money and I are going to have some wonderful adventures in this bus, that’s for sure. We already have.

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~Coleman