7 to 71 in 18

Two weeks from today I will load my family onto a forty foot school bus packed with bikes, clothes, school books, Legos, a BBQ, kitchen, bathroom, beds, a living room and a 17 foot canoe on top. For eight months we have worked, scraped, saved and converted this school bus into a house bus that we plan to drive to somewhere near Guatemala. As of today, everything is breaking because it is freezing outside and seven degrees. The propane is frozen, the batteries are kaput and our hands are chapped from working in the cold. The good news is that it is seventy one degrees in San Felipe, Mexico and we’ll be there in just 18 days.
Last year when we spent two months in Baja, we had plenty of time to watch all of the American and Canadian snow birds drive their big RVs into our campgrounds and maneuver them around palm trees and mangy mutts. The RVs ranged from tiny converted vans to half a million dollar big rigs with matching trucks being pulled behind. Steve and I were camping in our twenty year old VW van with our three kids. It was working for us but more space would definitely have been welcomed. We knew we wanted an RV to return to Mexico in but what it looked like, we couldn’t figure out.
My in-laws were in the desert in Arizona during the same time and drove down to San Felipe for a quick weekend visit. They left their big rig on the other side of the border and drove their jeep down from Calexico. After a summer of chemotherapy for my mother-in-law, it was great to see her eating fish tacos and flying kites with my kids on the beach. They’re easy to hang with and always have interesting things to talk about.
It was during this time that my father-in-law had mentioned he had recently met a cute little family camping out in the desert in a converted school bus. The story went something along the lines of garlic transporters, home-schooling, Mexico half the year and Canada the other half. He said their school bus had beds made of 2x4's and bikes and lots of space to stretch out in. He mentioned this story to us and I filed it away in the oh my god I’m not a freaking hippy file I always keep in the back of my head. There are other things in that file like “I don’t shave because I’m actually just lazy” or “Volkswagons are just easier because we’ve always had them”. My favorite file I keep is “but I don’t even like brown rice”. Really, we aren’t hippies. If we are, we fight the title with Pepsi, deodorant and occasional road rage.
After our adventures in Mexico and Guatemala, we returned to Portland in the spring and immediately began to look at RVs. We also looked at school buses but there were not a lot to chose from. The first one we looked at was forty feet long. We didn’t need anything forty feet long! For the same price we could buy a very small RV from the eighties with mold and a rusty fridge. The RV’s were also looking kind of cramped to me. I pictured constantly moving out of each others way to make the beds or even dinner. The kicker with every RV though was that we would not be able to store our bikes inside. Kind of important when free camping your way through Mexico with fancy bikes. The super long school bus looked better and better. We called the owner and struck up a deal. It all happened faster than was probably necessary but I think we would have never done it otherwise. When Steve drove the bus into our driveway, I think the panic and giggles began. Six months later we’re still giggling and panicking but either way, years from now, we’ll never forget the year we bought a school bus.