Latest / Her Journey Her Way / Do You Have to Build a Bus to Live in One? Lizzy Bought Hers Done.

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Do You Have to Build a Bus to Live in One? Lizzy Bought Hers Done. · Her Journey Her Way

• Rita Gardner: It's October, it's getting dark, you've got two dogs in the bus with you, and there are hay bales stacked between you and whatever else is out there in that field. So you can't see anybody and they can't see you. But all of a sudden a man you've never laid eyes on in your life comes walking across that field straight at you and says, Hey, are you going to the schoolie swarm? Now, you don't know him. You don't know what a schooly swarm is. You're just a woman who By yourself in a field, in your new bus. And then he invites you over to his campfire. I know some of the coolest people on the planet. They live in buses and vans and RVs and they'd tell you they've never been better. I'm Rita and this is Her Journey Her Way, a She Travel Simple podcast. I've traveled all over the country in everything from a tent to a 40 foot bus. The places are beautiful, the people are better. Every one of my friends has been through something, and every one of them has one thing you're going to want to know. Their stories, Their lessons their way. That's Lizzie. I love Lizzie, and when I sat down and thought about who I wanted to put in front of you first, out of everybody I know, it wasn't a hard decision. It had to be her. You'll see why. I sat down with her a couple of weeks ago and I made her tell me the whole thing from the beginning to today. So Lizzie is thirty-four. She'll tell you she's a mature thirty-four, and I agree. I totally agree. She doesn't look Older, but she definitely is more mature. She's an engineer in Ohio, and back then that meant that she had to go into the office every day to work. Here's the part I want you tell you about, because this is the part we've all dealt with, and this is the part you're gonna relate to. She'd been thinking about traveling full time for ten years before she ever bought that bus. Ten years. And somewhere in the middle of those ten years, she took a real hard look at it. She didn't just daydream about it. She took a hard look, a real look. She went and read about van life. She looked at what it would take. She sat down and she ran it against her actual life, what was really going on with her. And she decided it wasn't possible. She had a full-time job and she had to be in that office. So she put it on the back burner. But then COVID hit. And then the office and having to go in every day. Went away. The only thing that had been standing in her way for 10 years just stopped. Her excuses were gone. So guess what she did? She took it off the back burner and she moved it right up to the front. She bought her bus off the Facebook Marketplace the first weekend of November 2022. It's a 20-foot shorty, and if you've never been around this, a shorty is exactly what it sounds like, a short bus. And in the schoolie world, we measure our buses by windows. So hers is a five window with a handicapped door. It's a GMC on a 3500 chassis. It runs on gas, not diesel, and there are no air brakes. She told me flat out she didn't want anything complicated like air brakes, and she didn't want to deal with driving a full size rig, trying to find a parking spot and all the other logistics that come with a bus that's 30 or 40 feet long. Now She had never driven a bus, not once. She had never even sat in the driver's seat, but she bought it anyway. And here's the thing about her bus that I don't hear a lot of people talk about. It came already converted. A young couple in their twenties built it out. They traveled in it for about eight months and then they put it on Facebook Marketplace. Somebody else did all that hard work. They did the planning, they did the wiring, they spent the money, they spent the hours. Lizzie just bought it done. So if you're sitting there thinking you don't know how to build a bus, listen to me. You don't have to build a bus to live in a bus. I'm gonna say it again. You don't have to build a bus to live in a bus. If the bus build is the thing standing between you and the road, somebody out there already built one and they're tired of it and it's for sale right now. So why did Lizzie buy a bus and not a van? She's got two reasons and they're both dogs Moose and Cooper. She said a van would have been too small with the two of them and she wanted the space, so she needed something bigger than a van, but smaller than everything else. Now I asked her about the stuff, how she got rid of it. She was living in a friend's house. She said I got rid of a ton of crap. And then she put a lot of it in her parents' attic. Then she She looked at me and she said, I still have a lot. And anybody who's been through this will likely say the same thing. It doesn't matter. You can get rid of what feels like everything and you still feel like you have a lot. That is nearly what everybody I talk to says. They got rid of so much and they still have a lot. That's the truth. And most people won't tell you that. Everybody wants to show you the after picture. You know, the one shirt in the closet or the nicely folded pants in a drawer and everything fits. There's one candle, one book on the shelf. But this is the part I'm stealing from her forever. Her rule for what stays and what goes. She said, if it doesn't bring me joy, income, or an orgasm, I don't need it. That's it. That was her whole system. So go stand in front of the drawer you've been avoiding. Go stand in front of the closet, the basement, the room. And run that one and tell me how much is left. If it doesn't bring me joy, income, or an orgasm, I don't need it. So she buys it in November and she doesn't go anywhere until February, three months of sitting with it. She did some minor modifications, as almost everybody will do, but that first trip wasn't until February. It was about three weeks and then she took another week or two to drive home in it. And later on she took off on a two month trip. I asked her what she was scared of before that first one, what the fear was. And she said she wasn't scared. She was actually excited. And I love, love, love this next part. She said it was a new chapter. How about that? Like it's not a scary thing. It's a new chapter. And she said it wasn't like when you graduate and everybody tells you to go to college. This was I'm deciding to do this and it's gonna be whatever I make it. I am deciding to do this. Nobody hands you a bus, nobody tells you it's your turn. She just decided. But listen to what she said next because this is the useful part. She said, I didn't know anything. I didn't even know that your door could open driving down the highway or that the drawers will open. So there's your first tip and it's free. Before your first trip, go through every drawer, every cabinet. every door and figure out how it's staying shut at sixty five miles an hour on the highway. Latches, bungees, rope, I don't care because you're gonna find out one way or another what stays closed and what doesn't. And this is my personal tip. For drawers, if they are heavy, they are likely to fly open easier than if they are light. So if you have a drawer, put light things in the drawer. A Drawer with heavy pots and pans in it will fly open way before a drawer with Tupperware containers in it. So where does Lizzie spend the night in that bus? Well, it's not campgrounds. Her first choice is always harvest host. Now, if you don't know what a harvest host is, it's a membership program where farms and wineries and breweries and museums, restaurants, even churches. They let you park overnight on their land for free. You pay a yearly membership fee. That's it. It started in 2009, right after the 2008 recession, and the whole idea was to help out the little farms, the markets, the wineries, the breweries that were all hurting by this recession. And it was sending them some business. So that's the deal. So here's how it works. Right now there are three levels. Back then it was just sign up and you go. And it's probably changing all the time. But right now, the basic one is like ninety-nine dollars a year, and that's your farms, your wineries, your breweries, your museums. That's the one I have. The middle one adds Boondocker's Welcome, which is regular people letting you park on their property, not businesses. ⁓ sometimes they have hookups, and the top one is one hundred and seventy nine dollars. And that adds golf courses. I think there's escapees, a few other things in there. Now, here's the part that matters. Whatever you pay the day you sign up is supposed to be your rate going forward. So I joined in 2018 and I got in at $49. Eight years later, I'm still paying forty-nine dollars for that same basic membership. I'll tell you straight, they've raised some of the old rates on some people. They give you offers, but they don't keep the old rate. So you gotta really check it out. And even in a year when I'm not traveling much, I still pay it. Because number one, it's an experience. You're waking up on somebody's farm in the middle of a winery. It's really cool. And number two, good luck finding a legal place to park for less. Here's one thing to know though. There's usually no hookups, no water, no electric. You just park. So you need to be self-contained and you do need to buy something from them. That's the Expectation and it's a fair one. I mean, they're giving you a free place to sleep. You should go in and buy something from their shop, you know, get a bottle of wine, some eggs, a jar of honey. So what you do is you just call ahead and they say, Come on in, I'll tell you where to park, and that's the whole thing. The second place Lizzie parks is Cracker Barrel. Yep, Cracker Barrel. She said to me, Me and Cracker Barrel go way back. So she stays at cracker barrels probably eighty five percent of the time, maybe more. She figures she's stayed at seventy-five different cracker barrels. And she has every single one of them pinned in her Google Maps with a little skillet and egg icon. I think it's hysterical. And then she told me that she's got the muscle arm icon emoji pinned on all of the planet fitnesses that she's ever showered at. So imagine her map filled with these skillet and egg icons and the and the muscle arm icons are the emojis. She says her Google Maps is wild. Now, do you see the whole system? So she sleeps at Cracker Barrel, she showers at Planet Fitness, and it's all sitting on a map on her phone. So she can open up and see everywhere she's been and even whether she's been there before. Now that's not a hack you read online. That's 75 parking lots. That she has stayed in. Imagine that. 75 nights. Not a hotel at $100 a night. Just do that math real quick. I will. It's $7,500. How about that? One thing I'll add because I want everybody to know this and I want you to do it right. This goes for Walmart too. If Walmart's your thing, go inside and ask the manager every time. Don't be the person who just assumes they can park there. Ask them where they'd like you to park. Buy something while you're in there. Don't roll in, use the bathroom and roll out. Be kind. Support them so they can keep supporting us. Because we don't want this little treasure to go away. And believe me, it is a treasure. When you're trying to get from New Jersey all the way down to Florida in two days and you need a place to sleep and you don't feel like looking up a harvest host or a campground or figuring it out. It's so nice to just pull into the cracker barrel, into the Walmart, be respectful, get your sleep, get up the next morning and head back out. Okay, so let me tell you about the field. It's October, about a year after she bought the bus, but she is just starting on that two month trip. She pulls into the harvest host. It's a farm, it's a 300 acre farm. She gets to her spot, sets up for the night, and there are hay bells stacked between her rig and the next rig. Now she can't tell who's over there, but she sees that it's a bus. And all of a sudden, a guy comes walking up to her and says, Hey, are you going to Schoolie Swarm? And she said, What are you talking about? I don't even know who you are. Well, that was Ryan. Ryan is a friend of mine. And Ryan was in that bus on the other side of the field, on the other side of those hay bales. She just couldn't see everything because of the hay of the hay bales. And so he invites her to come sit at his campfire. I I will say a lot of these harvest hosts, you can't have campfires, but apparently this one he was allowed to. So that's just a little FYI. Now, here's the thing she said to me about that moment. And I want you to sit with this. This is important. So she said to herself. Do I go hang out with this guy who invited me over to a campfire in the middle of a field? Her instinct said no, and she went anyway. And that is where the trajectory of her life was about to change. Now, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you to ignore your gut or the hairs on the back of your neck. That's the best tool, the best equipment you've got. Mine has kept me out of a lot of parking spots. So listen to it, really listen to it. But I'll tell you what I think was actually going on in that field. That wasn't her gut. That was her training. That was her mind. That was 34 years of being told that a woman by herself doesn't walk toward a stranger in the dark. Those are two different voices, and you have to learn which one is talking to you. So She sits down at the campfire and he tells her about this community, about the events, and he mentions there's one happening a couple hours away that weekend and she should come. She had a couple extra days in her route, so she said sure. She paid for one or two nights, but she ended up staying for five or six. Now, that was the schoolie swarm we held in Virginia that year. And that's where I met Lizzie. Actually I I met her before the swarm even started. A group of us had gathered at a place nearby to get everything set up. We we were the volunteers. We were going to get in early and put the whole thing together, but we couldn't get into the property a day or two earlier because there was a wedding going on. So we met up in a spot in the next town over and that town welcomed us. We spent our money in that town and we frequented their stores Their restaurants, their laundromat, and it turned into a really good thing. That's a whole story for another time. So I'm at this place with a group of volunteers, and that's where Lizzie and Ryan show up. Think about the timeline for a second. A week before this, she didn't know a single one of us existed. Not one. I asked her what it did to her meeting people who lived the way she did. She said it changed everything. It gave me goosebumps when she said it, and it's giving me goosebumps right now because that's the whole beauty of this. She said, I probably wouldn't have lasted more than a year in that bus if I hadn't met people. Because you learned so much. Everybody's got a skill, everybody's got a resource. Somebody's always got the tool you need. And then she said the line I've been chewing on ever since. She said, Everybody thinks you're crazy when you tell your family I'm gonna buy a school bus or And I'm gonna live in it. And then you meet these people and they just get it. And they're your family instantly. Everybody thinks you're crazy. Then you find the people who don't. That's the whole difference between lasting a year and lasting three. So I asked her, for somebody who's getting on the road, should they go to the Schooly Swarm? She said, hands down, yes. Absolutely yes. Quick side note: you can head over to schoolyswarm.com to find out more. That's S K O O L I E. So Schoolie is spelled with a K, not a C H, and it ends in a I E, not a Y. So that's schoolyswarm.com. You'll see a list of events and ways to sign up and all that good stuff. There's also a group on Facebook. I would definitely recommend checking that out as well. Now. In Lizzie's four years on the road, she told me about one breakdown, and I want to tell you about it because there's a lesson sitting in the middle of it that's just too good to skip. She's driving home from the February Florida Swarm. That's one of the biggest ones we have. It's held every February down in Florida. And again, you can find that information at schoolyswarm.com. She was heading from Florida back to home in Ohio. Somewhere around Chattanooga, she starts smelling something rubbery. And I'm just gonna say this right here. If you smell something rubbery, start investigating. Don't wait until the smell brings a sound with it. But that's not what Lizzie did. And that's okay. We all do it. We all think, I'll get to that next spot and then I'll look. I just have to get here. I just have to do this. I'm just gonna push through. Anyway, that's what she did. So later that night it starts making a weird noise. She takes a video of the noise and she sends it to her brother in law. Now that's her phone a friend. He's good with cars. So she f sends him the video. Then the next morning, because now it's dark and she can't get a good look, she gets down on the ground and she crawls under her own bus. Now I want you to hear that. A thirty-four year old engineer alone on the side of the road. Well, she wasn't on the side of the road. I'll tell you about that in a second. She's in Tennessee. She's lying on the dirt under her school bus that she had never even driven, even dreamed of driving driving until two years earlier. This is what she told me. I didn't know anything down there. I didn't know what it was supposed to look like. I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what was out of place. But she took pictures of it anyway and she sent it to him. He looks at the pictures and he says, Your serpentine belt is off and you've got a bad idler pulley. Here's what that means. And I didn't know this before I bought a bus either. Don't wait to learn it. Learn it now. The serpentine belt is one long rubber belt that snakes around the front of your engine and runs pretty much everything. It runs your alternator, your power steering, your water pump. The idler pulley is that little wheel looking thing the belt rides on to keep it tight. It's the one you release or you pull in to get the belt off and on. So you You move this wheel, it loosens the belt so you can take it off and then you put a belt on and then you re you let the wheel come back and it kind of tightens the belt to keep it all in place. Just Google it. Do yourself a favor and Google it because it's a simple thing most of us don't even know exist. When that pulley goes bad, it stops putting tension on the belt. The belt gets a little loose and it starts slipping. Slipping rubber is a rubbery smell. And sometimes the belt can just get worn down and starts to tear up. And when that happens, it'll start making a noise. That's exactly what she was hearing in exactly that order. Now, if that belt comes all the way off, you lose your charging and your power steering, you're done. That bus is not going anywhere. Fortunately for her, she had enough belt to get to Knoxville. She called around and found a shop, but they couldn't take her. And then she asked them, Is there a guy in the area who can look at this? And they said, Yeah, we've got a mobile mechanic. And they gave her the number. So she calls him and she said he shows up and he's like 20 something with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. And he's saying, What's up, dude? He even asked her how old she was. So she felt like it was gonna go really well. And you'll never guess where all of this went down. A cracker barrel parking lot. Of course, her favorite place on earth. So she was basically at home. Anyway, he fixed it right there in the parking lot, and she was back on the road the next day after work. Yeah, she's working in her bus in a cracker barrel. That was the whole breakdown. Two things in there I want you to take away from this. One, she did not know what she was looking at. She's not a mechanic. But she took pictures and she sent them to somebody who did. Now, you don't have to know what it is, you don't have to know how to fix it. You have to be willing to lie down in the dirt, photograph it, and send it to somebody who does. Number two. When that shop said no, guess what she did? She asked them who they would call. That's the move. Those shops know they're not the only guy in town, and they know exactly who the other guys are. And if there's some idiot out there claiming to know what he's doing, they're not handing you his number, so ask. Get two or three numbers if you can. So where is Lizzie today? Well, she was full time in that bus for about four years, and a few weeks before I sat down with her, she moved into a family home right next to her grandparents' farm in Ohio. She knows that house, she knows that farm, she went home on her own terms. Now that's not quitting, She got what she went for, she got the skills, she got the community, she got to see the country. She got four years of her life she's never going to have to wonder about. And she decided she wants to knock out some other goals for a while. The bus is parked right there at the house, and she's still going out when she wants to. Just because you're not full time anymore doesn't make you less than. She's great, and she's gonna keep being great, and she's gonna take everything that road taught her into whatever she does next. Her exact words about that house were there's plenty of room for parking, so come on by. So if you're anywhere near Ohio and you want to meet this woman, she's got room for you. Honestly, I'd go. I went, and I'm gonna go again. Here's what I want you to take away from this. Lizzie stood in a field in the dark, and a stranger asked her to come sit at his campfire. Her first answer was no, but she went anyway. That no wasn't coming from her gut. It wasn't the hairs on the back of her neck. Her gut is the thing that keeps her out of a bad parking lot, keeps her from going down a windy road that she shouldn't be on. She should listen to that every single time. This was the other voice. This is what she had learned in school. This is what her family has taught her. This was thirty four years of being told that a woman by herself doesn't walk to a stranger in the dark. They're two different voices. Learn which one is talking, because Lizzie's whole life changed on the other side of those hay bells. She thought about it for ten years, she's four years in, and if you've been thinking about it for a decade or longer, that's not a disqualification. That's just the part she's Before it actually happens. Next time out, it's just me. I'm gonna tell you why I took a car instead of a van and what it taught me. Banf is where it happened, but the car is the story. You can get more information and read more stories over at She TravelsIple.com. There are blogs over there about lessons for the road and more Her Journey, Her Way stories. That's she travelsimple.com.