Arizona & Buying a bus…

When we took off in August, we had our route in mind but nothing was set in stone. We completed the TransAmerica trail in its entirety starting on the east coast and ended at the west coast. We really had no intention of staying in the Pacific Northwest until pet sitting opportunities kept us there and we really enjoyed the months we got to explore, even if it was cold and wet.

When we did finally start heading south into California, we discovered it was harder to find camping. There isn’t much for boondocking south of San Francisco and all the state parks were closed due to COVID. So we ended up traveling fast once again and started east earlier than we had wanted to.

We had also planned on heading to Alaska after spending March in Scottsdale with my mom. But as we traveled during the pandemic, even as things were slowly opening up, the Canadian border continues to stay closed. We kept saying if it opens by April…then May, we can still make it work. It has become clear that it won’t be open anytime soon so we had to  make other plans.

We really enjoyed our time in Arizona with my mom. My brother and his family, minus our nephew, Lucas, spent a week with us to. It was great to have us all together. We had fun exploring and played lots of cards.

We ended up spending a lot of time in the desert after we met some cool people through a Facebook group called Nomads Helping Nomads at the beginning of February. We ended up meeting up with them a handful of times over the past couple months and have really enjoyed spending time with them and hearing their stories of being nomads too.

One visit brought us to Wickenburg, AZ and our friend Scott mentioned there were multiple school buses for auction in Kingman, AZ for cheap. We hadn’t really been talking too much about getting a bus but this peaked our interest. So we took off to Kingman which was 2 hours away and inspected the few buses that checked the boxes of what we thought we would want. After checking them out we were really excited about Bus 197! We put in our bid and waited.

The auction ended March 22 and we are now the proud owners of a 2002 36′ Bluebird school bus. We are excited to be bringing it back to Michigan to build it out into a tiny home. The VugBus will be in addition to our Adventure Rig. We will move between the bus and Adventure Rig depending on the time of year and where we want to go.

Once we knew we had the bus, we went back to Kingman on March 25 and drove the bus back to Chandler, AZ. We had a week left of our stay with my mom so we put it in storage until we could get back to it.

After we left Scottsdale, we headed north to Utah. Our friends in Utah had been storing some truck parts for us and we decided that since we now had a bus, we could transport them back and we always love to see the Grimmers!! We also returned to where we had work done on the truck in Salt Lake City because the locker we had installed in the rig never worked. We were happy they could fix it. After a few fun days with Randy & Kristen in Northern Utah we headed back south.

We plan on picking up the bus and then head to SanTan Solar. It is located very close to where we put the bus in storage. We already ordered solar panels for the bus since we were so close and it will save us a ton in shipping. We had bought our solar panels for the Adventure Rig from this company and have been very happy with them. Then we will make the long drive home…separately. Craig will drive the bus and I will follow in the Adventure Rig. If all goes well we will be home this weekend. We are excited for a new project and really excited to see everyone at home.

A lot of people have said they didn’t see this coming…well, neither did we. We are adapting and adjusting as needed and are always open to different adventures. We are loving our life on the road! We love figuring out what we want to do day by day and the people we have met has been awesome. It’s a very freeing way to live and we are happy for the chance to do it together.