In an apt metaphor for everything else in my life, I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to start really writing and documenting my skoolie story. I wanted to start at the beginning and tell the story in the proper order… but if I wait until I really have time to sit down and write it all, it will never happen. So let’s just start, shall we? I’ll start where I am and go backwards and forwards in the story until I catch up. If I catch up.

So it’s Monday, August 1, 2022 and I’m drinking my coffee and looking out the window of my bus at the cardboard graveyard next door. One of the questions I get asked most about living in a bus is where I’m going to park it. Fortunately for me, my friend (and fellow fabulous artist) Ruth Baggett has a gorgeous commercial building turned home with a giant parking lot. She parks her camper there and has a 30 amp outlet that I can use when she doesn’t need it. It’s the perfect setup for giving me a place to park, giving Rocket her two dogs to play with, and giving us plenty of time to sit outside and talk about art! We have an arrangement that I pay her a small amount monthly and I can park in her lot whenever I’m in town. Right now that’s all the time, but hopefully in about three weeks I’ll be able to hit the road!

The other most asked question is where I’ll go for my first trip. My plan was to be on the road north by the beginning of June, but the skoolie conversion gods had a different plan for me. This story will come out over time, but the short version is that I had to find someone to redo a lot of the work that I just paid a van conversion company a lot of money to do wrong. Aside from doing things that the first guys hadn’t gotten around to or didn’t know how to do, the amazing guys at Elite Coach Sales in Paducah had to redo most of my electrical work and plumbing! I’ll go into more detail about that soon(ish). But it’s delayed my ability to live in the bus and travel by several months.

Since April I’ve been bouncing around from my sister Sandi’s AirBnB apartment, Sandi’s couch, the bus, other AirBnBs, visiting friends, a hotel and an attic apartment belonging to some friends. It’s been a challenge not knowing where I was going to sleep some nights – especially when it has been hovering around 100 degrees and I had no air conditioning in the bus until just over a week ago! And figuring out where my dog, Rocket, and my cat, Pixel, were going to sleep!! But now I’m very comfortable in the bus with fully functioning electricity, plumbing and air conditioning, and Pixel and Rocket are back on the bus with me and we are getting settled!

So my first longer trip is going to be Chicago at the end of the month. My amazing friend Anca Gray is hosting a very small retreat in her studio in Chicago and I plan to drive up in the bus and let that be the beginning of my first long trip. More about where I plan to go when I actually make a plan! But I hope to be able to take a couple of shorter trips before that to test everything out, make sure I know how to use all the systems, etc.

In the next few weeks, I plan to answer some of the questions people keep asking me. Things such as:

• Why a bus and not an RV?
• How I chose my bus, and the buying experience
• What am I doing with my life?
• What about driving the bus??
• Are you running away from something or toward something?
• Things I’ll miss about my house – what can I recreate? What do I have to just do without?
• And of course a lot about designing my new 200 square foot home and having it built, with lots of pictures and video!

What do you want to know about my journey? Let me know below!