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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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?)
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| 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.
