Here’s the background: We were on our way home Northern WI (back home to the SW), and saw a fleet of school buses for sale somewhere mid-state. Hmmmmmm I thought: after 5 camping trips this summer, and a recent 9 night Air BNB experience, and only wanting to do longer & longer trips, why not get a bus & convert it to an RV?! Rv’s themselves are quite expensive, and said to be made from very thin, cheap materials. Pull-behinds need a super fancy truck to pull them, something we don’t have…
So we came home with school buses on our mind, and hopped on to our local Craigslist, which is an hour away. And sure enough, our local school district, 5 miles away, had 3 of them up for sealed bid, with the bid due 2 days after we were seeing this post for the 1st time. We clicked around on Craigslist a bit more to see what some others were going for, and put in what we considered a low bid for either an ’01 or ’07 bus: $3500. I handed it to the local bus garage manager, and told him I looked forward to him calling me to come get my bus soon. And that they did! A couple days later I came home from a picnic at the park with my kids to a message on our machine that we had placed the highest bid & got 1st dibs!
It took a couple weeks from the time we were told we “won” it, and the time we picked it up, they removed the stop sign, the flashing lights, painted over the school name on the side. My Hubby went & picked it up on the rare day I was in my office 8 hrs. He picked it up at 11am, picked our kids up at Gigi’s (my Mom) at noon, by the time I got home at 5pm, this was in our driveway:
Best. Fort. Ever.
We HAVE to paint it something other than “national school bus yellow”, and have to do x,y,z (will write about later as I deal with them)! What we have in mind: living in WI is as awesome in so many ways! For travel, it’s a great central spot! We want to do 2-3 month loops from our home base. We will not be selling everything we own to live in this school bus, like some do. We will maintain our home base her in SW Wisco, and travel!!! A 2-3m NW loop, home again for 2-3m. A SW loop, a NE loop, a SE loop….. And visiting as many of YOU as possible along the way. Those of you I’ve been in contact with for YEARS now. It’s about time we finally meet. And maybe you just happen to have an XL driveway, back yard, or field we can park this beast in for a night or 2 or 7 while we’re passing through 🙂
Eco-friendly baby/family products MADE in USA 