On Finding Home - part 1

I grew up in a “semi-remote” cabin in Juneau, Alaska. When my parents bought the lot, the home was a pan-abode cabin – essentially a Lincoln-Log cabin big enough to live in. Barely. My father designed and built a timber-frame home in its place, every log, brick, nail, and window packed up from the beach and our trusty 14' Lund skiff. This skiff, a quarter-mile beach at low tide, or a half-mile walk over the hill and through the woods were our connection to the road system, the first and last part of any journey.

From the age of six until I moved out after high school, my home was tucked out of sight and mind, hidden in the Tongass National Forest, perched over the Inside Passages of the Pacific Ocean into Southeast Alaska. Neighborhood children were scarce, and the few playmates I had in the area tended, like me, to be happy fishing for Dolly Varden and flounders from the beach, using mussels as bait; mixing elixirs and poisons both imaginary and potentially expectorant; adventuring amongst the rocks, looking for treasures – or any interesting flotsam.

I spent many a dark night feeling my way over the hill, my youthful imagination making the most of every shadow and crack in the forest around me. At times on all fours, feeling amongst the moss and rotting stumps for the void, the emptiness of the trail, wishing time and again that I had an extra flashlight, or that I had changed the batteries in the dead one I grasped like a club, ready to respond to a bear in my face as best as I could. (The nose is the softest, easiest hit on a bear, with the best likelihood of resulting in the bear's departure.) One night, with six inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground, it took over an hour for my mother, sister, our next-door neighbor, and I to find our way home in this manner, calling to one another in the dark when we found what we thought was the path, or when we needed to feel our way back to each other.

Nightmares of our tiny skiff being swamped or capsized were not always terrors experienced from the comfort of bed. At as young as eight, my chores could include taking the boat to give a parent or a guest a ride to or from the road when the water was calm. The water was not always calm, and I was not eight for long. My experience grew, and my luck saved me on several occasions, such as when I realized just feet from a jetty of rocks that I was much too close to shore, going full speed in the dark. Or when the waves stood up just past our beach, crashing over the stern of the boat even as the bow rose over the crest of the wave ahead, unable to get far enough up the wave to escape the trough into which the outboard seemed to pull, a sucking feeling in my heart as I knew that the ocean was on the brink of swallowing me into its churning embrace.

In such experiences, I learned without thinking about the lesson – I had to get home. There was no other option. Crawl on all fours, feel your way blind through a forest, turn the boat into the wind. Find home.

With many years of used-up-luck and slowly earned experience behind me, I now find myself searching for home once more. This time, I seek not a home I've found before, but a new abode for heart and soul. The journey seems more perilous without a destination, and with no idea what paths might lead me there; but as in my early years, make it home I must, or live on the road as I seek.

“Home is where the heart is”, though perhaps tired and worn, is also tried and true, an adage for the ages akin to the Golden Rule in both simplicity and longevity. As I ponder the roads ahead, feeling loss and separation as I am sundered from my community, my friends and family, I return to this thought. Rejoicing in the moment, in each sunrise and the opportunities of the new world in each new day, I remember that NOW is when and where I am, and that the only home I truly need is the space in which I find myself in that given instant. I can find solace in the air I breathe, the food I eat, the nutrients and energy flowing and cycling within and through me. I can love those I love from afar, remembering their voices, faces, and hearts. The soil beneath my feet will change as I move over the land, but in letting go of roots I can find myself a citizen of a larger community, a part of a world beyond any horizon. Moving into stillness, and finding stillness in motion: even as I seek a place to put down new roots, I carry my connections and find that distance does not sunder friendships or love. Experience will always change us, and our luck may run out or grow thin, but our history supports us, tying us together as we weave the here-and-now.

I laugh to myself as I write these words, my personal mantra of many years resounding in my mind if not ringing in my ears. I have believed this since I wrote it, nearly two decades ago in Salt Lake City, but perhaps I am only now learning how right I was when I first intoned:

nutrients cycle and energy flows,

here we are, what is:

let's go!

I have not found home yet, but I carry it in my being, and know it holds me in its safe embrace, whatever path my feet may tread.

Namaste.

Time to Tinker

Over the last few days, Jess and I have stepped away from work on Velda, our Wonderbus and future home, and have returned to our love of making toys. Colorful bears are multiplying in the living room while dragons breed in the garage, but diving into tinkering is not without its learning experiences.

Although she's sewn dozens of bears out of her quilt scraps, it's been a while since Jess has assembled a teddy...so in her first attempt Wednesday, she fabricated three left arms before a right. That hiccup passed, and she brought a beautiful little pastel-flower bear into being yesterday, with one right and one left arm, and a matching set of legs. Its ears are cushy-soft micro-pillows that beg to be squished, and I envy whoever gets to lay their head on this teddy.*

I spent most of Wednesday learning about my new (almost) all-in-one tool, a Shop Smith Mark V. Especially how to adjust the band saw so that it wouldn't throw the band off and/or break it. Cutting the “blanks” (the rough-draft toy: no sanding, no holes, just the basic shape) for two new dragon toys took almost all day. For comparison, in the past I've managed to cut them out in about 20 minutes each with my jig saw, although the cuts aren't as clean and the tight corners aren't as tight as they are with the band saw. My DeWalt cordless jig saw can only cut approximately one-and-a-quarter toy blanks from 3/4” wood on one battery charge, so it just isn't a practical tool for the entire process. Be that as it may, I learned a lot about my Shop Smith, and got a lot of experience replacing and adjusting the band saw blade.

Thursday, I sanded. Which is in and of itself a simple process: apply friction, remove unwanted material. Of course, when you're dealing with tiny little crevices and trying to remove any possibility of splinters or roughness, things get...complicated. Let's just say that I've been struggling with figuring out what tools will best accomplish my goal of sanding nooks and crannies, and although I haven't had a stroke of inspiration which panned out yet, I've had lots of ideas and have attempted to make most of them work. With the result that I hand-sand the crevices and hard-to-reach bits with custom-folded/wadded/twisted sandpaper. Keeping it Old School. Sandpaper, fingers, elbow grease. (An aside: although I heard the term many times as a youth, it wasn't until late in middle school that I realized that “elbow grease” wasn't something you bought at a hardware store, but a metaphor).

After setting aside several mastadons and panthers which involved unforeseen complications in design, I finished six dragons, each of which had evolved from its own piece of wood in a different way, even though I'd only used two templates for their body types. Each sanded at least three times, with the final round by hand (everywhere, crevices or no). With the toys ready for oiling and wheels, I did my obligatory round of quality control:

Now, I'm not going to mimic a two-year-old and throw my toys across the room or jump up and down on them, but I do expect my product to meet a reasonable level of durability requirements, so slapping them together to get the dust off is a perfectly acceptable way for me to break my own toys. And break my toys I did. Every. Single. One.

In retrospect, I may be asking more of my toys than is reasonable. I gave a prototype to my three-year-old godson in August, and he still hasn't broken it (although his younger brother broke another toy within about two minutes of receiving it, hence the “mastadons aren't ready yet” situation). But no, I thought that a 185-lb 38-year-old slamming toys together would be an appropriate test of the forces that a child might exert on them, and broke every last one of them. The little wings and twisted tails which gave the dragons a taste of whimsy all gave flight, leaving shards and stumps where their fragile grandeur had once been.

So Friday (today, by the time I post this), I'll spend the day re-designing my flock and getting ready to send it out into The Holidays. The good news is, I've learned something new this week. Lots of new things, actually. Many of them have to do with the structural integrity of wood along its grain line. Adjusting my process and checking for weak points before final sanding is another lesson which will come in handy in the future. Humility and Patience were in there too, and Humor was chortling from the sidelines all day long as I struggled to sand the detailed curves of tail and wing, all destined to fly off in their own directions and all, ultimately, to the scrap bin.

Between Jess' extra bear arms and my extraneous wings and tails, it's looking a little like an abattoir around here. But it's also looking like a wonderful menagerie of wood and fabric: rotund little bears; scraps of quilts bursting in color; the scent of cedar, pine, hemlock; dragons, mastadons, and panthers vying for completion amid piles of wooden wheels ready to trundle them into the world.

Strong wings and fierce cuddles, my friends.

*I have used special (i.e. $$$) ergonomic/chiropractic pillows for neck support for over twenty years, and have trouble finding a pillow that can support my neck and head appropriately in both side- and back-sleeping positions. I have used the (very squished) bear below as a pillow for the last year, and have never had a pillow provide such fantastic neck support. Notably, he's also stood up to weekly machine washings and dryings without complaint – or pulled stitches.

Helooooo Michigan!

We just woke up after a second night in Adrian, Michigan, yesterday having been a more-than-successful day of shopping for random RV parts. We planned our trip here to visit the physical site of an ebay store run by a fantastically charismatic man who has run any number (really, ANY number) of family businesses. A former motel, with seven barns, acres of bins of holding tanks, and who-knows-what-else tucked into every nook and cranny of a property which is perhaps still an auxiliary fire department as well as Hoyt & Flynn, CPAs, Madison Central Wholesale is an amazing amalgam of the last 50 years. The grounds are as confusing as that last sentence, but we walked out with new water and gray-water tanks, a ladder, folding stairs, and an odd-shaped window for a reasonable price. The 800-mile drive here wouldn't have made much sense just for the savings on these items, but at $120-160 shipping for each window, and 10 windows (plus a lot of other stuff) on our list, it didn't make sense to NOT come pick everything up ourselves.

And then, the day before we left Wisconsin to come here, I found Tri-State Surplus. With windows $20 less than our original destination, as well as a selection of refurbished refrigerators and stoves (shipping: $250-$400 each) that were priced around 1/3 of the retail price, we managed to fill our trailer with appliances and windows for $2500 - more than I had planned on spending, but way more stuff for Velda than I had hoped to find on this trip. We spent the day driving back and forth between Adrian and Hudson, first pricing and then purchasing and packing our finds. Unpacking the truck is going to be like a giant tarp-wrapped Christmas morning.

Jess pondering how to pack

Rather than head back through Gary, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois and their attendant heavy traffic, we're going to take a slightly longer route north through Michigan and back to Wisconsin via the Upper Peninsula. I've been finding the mid-west to be much more beautiful than I expected, and although I constantly miss having mountains on the horizon (or in my face), the rolling hills, small farms, and forests of this part of the world are gorgeous. And now I get to drive through a whole new part of the world, see two new Great Lakes (Huron and Michigan), and see terrain that passes for mountainous in the relative topographic calm between the Rockies and Appalachians! 

On the road again

Work on Velda is progressing, with nearly all of the wires for lights, speakers, emergency exits, alarms, etc. pulled back to "the box": next step removing as much as possible so that we can make sense of what's left. One frequent poster on skoolie.net (a fantastic resource for those engaged in school bus to RV conversions) suggested that we simply weld the door shut and forget about the mess behind it.

We had Insulation Plus, a local insulation contractor, cut metal panels to replace the doors we're removing and all of the windows that will be replaced with insulated RV windows, and spent the last couple of days prepping and painting them. Of course, we ran out of paint and had to get more before we could put the final coat on, and by then the weather had turned and wasn't conducive to painting outside any more. 

I also took advantage of those 65-degree days to clean the old caulking out of seams in the roof (with special attention to the one seam which leaked every time it rained), re-caulk them, and paint the roof. I'm not really very cool about heights, but Velda is so wide, and relatively flat on top, that I didn't feel nervous at all - although I went barefoot to ensure the best possible traction.

Which brings us to the next step: getting the windows that will go in said panels. And the water tanks, refrigerator, stove, awning, seats, steps...all that fun stuff. So we're hitting the road again this afternoon, headed to Adrian and Hudson, Michigan to visit two stores that sell such things. The 800-mile (one-way) trip might seem excessive, but with shipping prices of $100-400 per item, and over twenty items on our list, it makes sense to go get everything ourselves.

Tonight we'll stay in Madison with a close friend of Jess' and her husband, the incredibly talented Michael Riverun. The next day we cross Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio before heading north into Michigan: four states I've never been in before! We managed to get the last hotel room in Adrian for tomorrow night; it's Parent's Weekend at Adrian College and there is a state-wide x-country meet this weekend twenty minutes from Adrian, so it's going to be an interesting scene at the hotel. 

I haven't heard much to make me excited about the scenery along the way (Gary, Indiana), but it will be good to be back on the road, and having all the various parts on-hand for our re-build will be a huge step forward. 

Until next time: drive safe and have fun!

Ben

Luke would go

Last night, Jess and I came home from an adventure sans Velda. Our weekend away from working on her started with a roundabout series of flights from Central Wisconsin Airport to Chicago, to Seattle, and into Bozeman. Ten hours in the air and a world away from our daily reality of research and work, we stepped into the West flanked by some of my dearest friends at 1:30 AM. After a short night's sleep at the Bozeman Comfort Inn, we barreled south through West Yellowstone, stopping for an impromptu dance party/pee break and a herd of buffalo loitering in a roadside parking lot.

Fresh off a 5,000+ mile road trip, I drove like I meant to get to Driggs on time – to the chagrin of the occupants of the other rental car in our convoy. I drove like I ski: steadily, quickly, but cautiously; pausing and biding my time when we trailed semis through twisting canyons, accelerating without hesitation when my opening appeared and I knew I could make it safely. Always within the bounds of physics and the ability of my vehicle and the situation ahead of me.

Of course, it's always easier to be in control of such situations than to sit by and watch while you hurtle down the road, hoping the driver really knows what's going on. The over-abundance of crosses on the side of the road did nothing to calm anyone's nerves, clusters of the little white monuments attesting to the loss, en masse, of entire carfuls of humanity. As we were racing towards a memorial and celebration of life of a dear friend, taken too early by an aggressive brain cancer (glioblastoma multiforme), death was surely on all of our minds as we passed these testaments to lives ended too soon. And in battling cancer, unlike road trips, no-one is driving. Surely, choices can be made in terms of treatments and mindset, but ultimately the road ahead is a blind one, and it is impossible to steer clear of all obstacles in that journey. Luke's wife, Claire Vitucci, had kept us all abreast of their navigation of the fight against his cancer through her blog, and the route they took could never have been anticipated.

We arrived at Linn Canyon Ranch a few minutes before the shotgun blast signaling the beginning of the ceremony and made our way through a meadow, into a stand of aspen and a glade nestled between foothills of the Tetons. Rainbows of prayer flags rustled gently, answering the muted voices and sobs of the congregants filtering through the trees. Love and sadness, wracking grief and joy at reunion mixed with the smell of hay, of ripe earth preparing for winter, cheeks wet as we struggled with the reality of having lost Luke Neraas. With the reality that the world had lost this monster of love and joy, a feisty machine of a man who could out-hike, out-fish, out-hunt, out-ski, and out-laugh nearly any mortal. 

Again and again as his friends and family spoke of their experiences with Luke, we were reminded that we would all have to love a little harder, laugh a little louder, and live a whole lot bigger if we were to honor the man we had lost. We were reminded that as people lucky enough to have loved, and been loved by, Luke, we were family and not just friends.

As the night progressed, the fire rose with our prayers and messages, sticks brought from around the country wrapped and bound with cords and cloth of his favorite colors. Tears continued to flow, as they will for years when we think of Luke and the void he has left, but laughter and song flowed through the air around us. A leaf fight broke out in the dark, adults giggling and cavorting with silly abandon; group hugs grew to throngs, a hundred hurting hearts joining in embrace, leaning on each other as we supported those around us. 

 

The trip back to Bozeman, this time on the deadline of flight departures for our group to return to Juneau, or to scatter to North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin, was subdued. Our hearts were open and raw, the relative joy at our reunion tempered as each mile rolled away beneath us. The snow line had come down in the night, and peaks draped in white lit up above golden plains. A lone moose stood in a field on the outskirts of Tetonia, Luke's spirit animal seeing us off on our next journey.

As our group split at the terminal, we were reminded once again that the purpose of the journey had been reunion and celebration as much as remembrance; connection and love as much as loss. We held each other close in another group hug, our little family of friends holding each other tight, rejoicing in the intimacy and trust of our relationships. Luke's spirit, no longer confined to a single biologic unit, filled the air around us, brightening the rays of sun breaking through the clouds and shining with ethereal brightness off the snow-capped peaks past which we had raced, and the dangerous road we each travel every day.

The end can come for each of us at any time. Softly, terribly, quietly, by insane cells within us or with screams of rending metal, we all pass that way. In the meantime, we owe it to ourselves to live rampantly, to take every opportunity to experience the world around us to its fullest. Surely, with care and grace, measured steps and reasoned chances, but with conviction and without fear. And always, with love for those around us and for the land beneath our feet.

Luke would go. And so, too, shall we.

It's getting cold out there...

Velda's makeover is coming along, but as these things go, she's looking a lot rougher now than she did originally. Since we're still working on her exterior, we're racing against the changing seasons. The forecast only provides us a few hours of temperatures over 50 degrees in the next week, and with showers forecast for that “hot” period tomorrow, we need to finish cleaning her this morning so we can prime this afternoon – and hopefully get a first coat of paint on!

After five test colors (four of which appear below), we decided to go with a midnight blue. Velda is so big that any bright color would make her visible from space by the naked eye, so we decided that a very dark blue would help her disappear into shadows (and at least not be overly-intrusive at night).

The paint guy at Fleet Farm helped us determine that Bunker Hill's Old 55 Tractor & Implement paint was the most appropriate paint they had: and having visited both Benjamin Moore (who sent us back to Fleet Farm) and Sherwin-Williams stores and been informed that they didn't have any remotely appropriate paint, we didn't see much of an option. In much greater detail than was necessary, and with repetition that was reminiscent of watching paint dry, he described how to mix their darkest blue with a little black to obtain the color we wanted. More and more customers began milling around the paint station, waiting their turn to be assisted...and on and on he went, describing once again how to gradually mix the paints. We finally escaped his verbose and hospitable customer service; paint, thinner, mixing bucket, and sprayer joining the new generator in the back of the truck.

The sun is rising, and starting to melt last night's frost on the lawn, so we're off to clean, tape, prime, mix paint, and (fingers crossed) paint.

Be safe and have fun out there!

Ben

Hello Velda!

Hello from Wisconsin, from Jess, Ben, Kobi, Frank, and Velda! That's right, we actually made it to our destination with all fingers, toes, and vehicles intact. The 5,571-mile drive could have been accomplished a bit more efficiently, but what's an extra 1,500 miles here and there?

Originally, we had intended to keep this blog updated while we were on the road, but the technological reality of attempting to upload something to the internet when you don't even have a cellular connection, let alone WiFi, precluded some timely postings; the copious amounts of dirt and dust at some camp sites further dampened our interest in pulling out the computer to write. Heck, all I really wanted to do many days was to wash my hands and face with warm water and soap.

But now that we've reached Iola and our home for the next few months, we can get you caught up on the Adventures of Velda the Wonderbus (or, in the event of zombie apocalypse or other Mad Max/the Road scenario, Velda the Destroyer). 

 

We meet Velda the Wonderbus in Thornton, CO

Velda is strong, Velda is powerful, and Velda takes at least a quarter of a mile to get up to 15 mph. And another quarter-mile to get to 25. After that, she accelerates pretty smoothly (getting over the 45 mph hump takes a little patience too), and once she hits 55 all she wants to do is go faster and faster, humming with delight when she gets to go 65-70. But that isn't to say that we haven't already had some mechanical, electrical, and operational adventures with her.

We'll get you caught up on our journey from Alaska to Colorado in a future post (or three), but for now the scene is set in Thornton, Colorado, which is essentially north Denver. That is, it's a city, and there is a lot of traffic, and there are big-box stores and traffic lights and turning lanes and signs and higgley-piggley suburban messiness all around. On our way south to pick up the bus from our Colorado base of operations in Severance (east of Fort Collins), we passed two accidents on the freeway, both of which had caused miles of backed-up traffic, and both of which involved semi trucks which had rear-ended other vehicles. (This is a theme for accidents that we've seen on this trip – all but two of the accidents we passed in our journey involved semis rear-ending other vehicles.) So with those confidence-building images in our heads, we pulled into the Adams 12 Five-Star Schools' fleet facility to pick up our new bus. Our contact and the Fleet Manager, Ryan, brought us out to the yard and introduced us; unfortunately Velda's speech was impeded by her dead batteries, so we had to wait for Ryan to jump her before we could hear her roar for the first time. Although the dead batteries (there are three of them – apparently this is a lot of batteries even for a big diesel, which often just have two) were a little worrisome, she had sat all summer without being driven, so it followed that they might be drained and need to charge up for a while and we didn't give it too much thought.

By the time we were ready to pull out of the fleet lot, drivers were pouring out of the building and taking their seats behind the wheels of dozens and dozens of other buses, which meant that my first experience driving Velda was leaving the fleet facility in the midst of a train of buses. Far from sneaking out quietly while no-one was watching, my ability to drive Velda successfully was suddenly on display for an entire fleet's worth of drivers. And since I couldn't get her to even approach 15 mph on the road out of the facility, my embarrassment, worry, and stress levels were peaking by the time I turned onto the main road and headed for the Super Target where Jess and I had agreed to meet. Of course, I had just gotten Velda up to 25 when I realized that I was passing the entrance to the Target parking lot and that I now had to figure out how to get turned around and reach our rendezvous.

After a few uncomfortable left turns, wherein I managed to run the rear wheels of the bus over every median, curb, and divider that I encountered, I pulled into the Target lot and connected with Jess. Shaken, but ultimately successful in our mission so far, we decided to head straight to the nearest DMV office to register Velda. Since we needed to keep her running for at least an hour to charge the batteries, Jess would wait with Velda while I navigated the line and paperwork to get our new home registered.

Of course, county DMV offices aren't big-box stores, so their parking lots are reasonably-sized, and therefore not conducive to being used by buses. We parked Velda in the comparatively empty lot of an engineering and surveying firm next to the DMV where she hummed, growled, and occasionally let forth a blast of air; I entered the Adams County DMV.

An hour-and-a-half later, I exited, dejected and on the verge of panic. I had no registration, and we would have to head north to our base without the proper paper work (we'll fill in the details of licensing, registration, and insurance in a later post). The succinct version is that we couldn't find anyone who would insure Velda without her current registration, and the DMV wouldn't register her unless we had proof of insurance. So now I had 50+ miles of suburbs and country roads to navigate in rush hour traffic, without any experience in such a large vehicle (she's 39.5' long), insurance, or registration. To make matters more interesting, Jess and I were relying on my memory of the map I had looked at to get us home; my phone was dead and charging in Frank with Jess, so we had no way to communicate. And at the first stop light, I lost her.

At the second stop light, in a panic, I turned – onto the wrong road, going in the wrong direction from our destination (that is, back into the vehicular fray of Thornton and Denver's other suburbs). At a loss for other options, I pulled over into a tiny dirt patch at the end of a merge lane and began rending my hair:It seemed like a reasonable way of dealing with the situation at the time, and lacking any better ideas, I rent a little more. And then Frank appeared in the traffic approaching from behind, pulling in with hazards flashing to provide me a little protection from the queue (I still hadn't figured out where the hazard signal switch was in Velda, and I was terrified of accidentally triggering the warning flashers which would cause traffic to come to a standstill).

Jess passed my phone back to me and we made a new plan for getting out of town, kissed good luck, and were on the road again. Which we would shortly lose again, finding ourselves now parked between prominent “no parking any time” signs in the only turnout which could fit Velda that I had seen in miles. We again plotted a new route, and managed to stick with it through increasingly rural areas, leaving the multi-lane roads and big-box stores behind for narrow, no-shoulder country roads which shot straight through fields of hay, corn, cows, sheep, and fracking operations with attendant gas lines and compression stations.

Darkness fell, and aside from a short battle between Velda's side mirror and some street trees in one of the tiny towns we passed through, our journey was without incident. Until I realized that I had once again missed my turn. Although we were close to home for the night, I was faced with a choice: continue forward to a right-turn into a major construction project with narrow, uneven lanes and reduced turning radii; or, somehow turn Velda around on a narrow country road and take our originally-planned route home. A driveway to a housing development came into view, one of the many “Hilltop Vistas” or “Bridle Valleys” which replace agricultural and wild lands with car-dependent monocultural developments of nearly-identical homes far from schools, jobs, shopping, and anything other than more suburbs. (For those who don't know this, I spent the last decade as a land use and transportation planner, and have a few opinions on our conversion of agricultural lands from productive to consumptive land uses.)

Without a way to properly warn Jess of my intentions, I initiated a five-point turn to get Velda pointing south again. To hear Jess tell it, the scene is terrifying: Velda blocks both lanes of traffic, her wheels to the edge of the pavement, beyond which the precipices of irrigation ditches lurk on both sides. Her view of traffic approaching from the north is blocked by the bus, but the lack of approaching lights from the south does nothing to reassure her. Somehow, the bus completes its pirouette and no vehicles have come into view from north or south; Jess is able to turn Frank and follow me back to our originally-planned route home.

Velda in Severance, CO

The next day was spent attempting to address the registration/insurance conundrum, which, like finger-cuffs, ultimately required a head-on approach to finding a solution. As I said above, we'll cover this trap, a common one for those hoping to convert a school bus into an RV, in another post dedicated to that topic. Suffice it to say that with one phone call, Jess was able to obtain a 12-month policy at a laughable cost (after all, school buses are just about the safest vehicles on the road). My days of research, hours on hold, messages left and unreturned (even my long-time local Juneau insurer, Reuben Willis State Farm, failed to return my calls) were swept away in her moment of brilliance.

Proof of insurance in hand, the following day we set out to register Velda and to drop her off for a tune-up and check-up at Diesel Services of Northern Colorado. Or at least, that's what we intended to do, until we found that she wouldn't start. Assuming that the batteries were dead again, we headed to the nearest NAPA and purchased heavy-duty jumper cables. After more than 20 minutes of charging (Greg, our contact at Diesel Services, informed us that 15 minutes should be sufficient), Velda still wouldn't start. At Greg's suggestion, we called a tow truck to bring her the 15 or so miles to the shop, and headed out ourselves to get her registered and run other errands.

An hour later, we received a call from the tow truck driver, who had needed to turn Velda around so that he could tow her. He had jumped her and she was running, but if she was running, did we still need the tow? A $160 jump start (he had brought the BIG tow truck and trailer), but she was running. We headed back to Severance to pick her up and get her to the shop.

Velda, meanwhile, was purring happily (her purr is rather roar-like) when we retrieved her, and we were able to set out for Diesel Services, albeit several hours after we had planned. Once we arrived, Greg and his crew set to work on our laundry list: tune up and general inspection, oil and filter change, disabling the various safety features required of a school bus but not an RV (e.g. the starter disabling mechanisms wired into the emergency exit doors, which prevent the vehicle from starting if the doors are locked), inspecting the engine brake, getting the fans and wipers to work, and checking out her overly-pokey acceleration. Of course, with no idea what would need to be fixed, they were unable to give us any kind of estimate on when she'd be done...

So we went camping. 

Kobi in Mountain Park C.G.

Located just 40 miles from “Old Town” Fort Collins (a downtown/Main Street-feeling neighborhood full of interesting shops, breweries, restaurants, and a vibrant street life - not to be confused with “Downtown” Fort Collins, which appears to be developed exclusively with mobile home parks and the aging “Plumer School”), the Poudre Canyon in the Roosevelt & Arapahoe National Forests is a recreational outlet and a gateway to wilderness for Fort Collins and its suburbanized vicinity. The canyon is lined with campgrounds, trailheads, pullouts, and views so variegated that you either want to pull out at every turn to take them in, or you just pull halfway off the road on a blind corner of a road with no shoulders and cliffs on both sides to take pictures (see below, where we find out if Colorado drivers really are the worst we'll encounter on this trip).

The Poudre River, Arapahoe & Roosevelt National Forests

After having Velda in the shop for over a week, four days of which we spent at Mountain Park Campground, we were told that she was ready to go. We returned to Fort Collins and Diesel Services, where Greg went through their various fixes, taking the time to explain different systems and remind us of important considerations (we heard "watch the tail swing on this thing" several times), and even learned how to turn on the fans! (In a bus with no AC* this will be important) 

I arranged Kobi's bed where he could watch me but be comfortable and out of the way, and realized another thing that is important is not having the emergency exit door alarm go off constantly. So I pointed this irritating, grating noise out to the mechanics, who immediately sprang (literally. I mean, the guy was running back and forth across the yard with tools) into action and disabled the alarm. Well, he had to disassemble several sections of bus wall and remove numerous lights and speakers to do it, but he did it, and then put it all back together again. After establishing that I didn't owe any more money for his time, we shook hands all around again, and again I took the driver's seat. And saw that the fans, which had been running before we noticed the alarm (Velda's kind of loud, even without an emergency alarm going off), were no longer spinning. And the radio was powerless. 

Twice-daily bird commute through Severance, CO

So we returned to Chelsea and Keegan McCarthy's home without Velda once again, growing more anxious by the hour to start the next leg of our journey. Luckily, Diesel Services was able to fix the alarm and get us on the road the next day, complete with working radio (at least until I'd snap the antenna in half in Iowa, but that comes later), fans, and no unnecessary alarms. After ten days in Colorado, we had a fully functioning, road-worthy, insured, registered bus, and were ready to hit the road and complete our journey to, in which we:

- Caravan Velda, a 39-foot International Genesis bus and our future home, and Frank, a 2004 Ford Explorer and current home (with due gratitude and respect to the Mountain Hardware Lightwedge 3 tent which has provided us with shelter for most of the last month) to Wisconsin;

- Discover that Nebraska (and therefore likely Kansas) actually exists, and isn't just a box on a map where nothing else goes; and,

- Find out if Colorado drivers are the worst drivers we encounter in a 5,000 mile road trip, or if drivers in Nebraska, Iowa, or Wisconsin can possibly be worse. (Hint: My money is on Colorado drivers. I mean, how could you possibly be more aggressive and simultaneously have less idea of what's going on on the road 50 feet ahead of you?)

Kobi was interested in seeing what was going on when we drove Velda for about five minutes.

Kobi will sleep through almost all of it.

*a feature which was listed on the auction but which does not appear in the actual vehicle.

A pile of drafts...

Greetings from Wisconsin! 

We have a pile of drafts which will be published in the coming days, but in the meantime, we've changed the name of the blog to relate to our magnificent steed, the lovely Velda the Wonderbus. We'll still be tinkering as planned, but as we thought about this venture/adventure, we realized that our journeying and adventuring shouldn't be those of a toy company - so although Thimbleberry Toys will doubtless make an appearance from time to time, stay tuned here for The Adventures of Velda the Wonderbus!

Much love-
Ben, Jess, Velda, and Kobi

 

Velda, racing towards the full moon and eclipse, somewhere in Iowa

Welcome to Thimbleberry Toys' blog, where we'll tell stories about our adventures in nomadic toymaking, including the conversion of a 1999 International Genesis school bus into our home, wood shop, and quilting studio. The topics we cover here will be widely disparate, but we'll try to keep things organized enough that you can see what you're interested in, and skip the other stuff. In chronological order, the posts will tell many parts of a story that is sure to be weird and wonderful (and perhaps terrifying at times).

Thimbleberry Toys is Jess Lila and Ben Lyman, along with our honorary chairdog, Kobi, a 14+ year old Australian Cattle Dog (Heeler)/Corgi mix who will be directing rest stops and walks as we traverse the continent.

We're leaving Ben's home town of Juneau, AK, in less than one week, on August 23, 2015. Packing has commenced, and boxes are in the mail to Iola, WI and Jess' mom's house, where we'll be converting the bus. We've done heaps of research into buses, registration, conversion to RV, generators, refrigeration systems, wood working tools, dust management and air filtration, and more; much of this research (and that we haven't done yet) will become blog posts here.

We'll also be blogging about our travel adventures, and are aiming to find and connect with local communities, strengthening ties between regions as we learn and share along the way. Oh yeah, and making toys, quilts, teddy bears, and similarly fun stuff from materials we find along the way. We hope that you join us when we're in your neighborhood, and invite you to help us find our way across the continent. If there's an event or fair, a festival or even just a great place for us to park the bus while we explore the area and make more toys, please let us know!

We're at facebook.com/thimbleberrytoys and on Google+ as Thimbleberry Toys. Our email address is - believe it or not - thimbleberrytoys@gmail.com.

See you on the road!

- Ben