Latest / Her Journey Her Way / What Do You Refuse to Give Up? Nikki Started There
Transcript
- Rita INTRO RECORDINGS: I'm Rita, and this is Her Journey Her Way, a She Travel Simple podcast. I've traveled all over the world, but it's the women I meet who stay with me. These are their stories, how they began and how they got here. Her journey, her way. Nikki May Podcast: Nikki Mae is 58 years old, and as of this past April, she's been living in her school bus for four years. It's just her, her cat Pixel, and her dog. When I met up with Nikki in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, that dog was Rocket. Unfortunately, shortly after, Rocket passed away, and now she has Rook. Rook is a 70 pound Doberman who just loves. everybody and I got to meet Rook at the Schoolie's Form in Bainbridge, New York this past fall. Rook is a beautiful dog, a very excitable dog, and I wish Rook and Nikki the best. and Pixel, which as Nikki says, Rook and Pixel are still in negotiations. and I hope that works out soon for her. Anyway I met Nikki in October of 2022 at the schoolie swarm that they held in North Carolina that fall. It was her very first trip in the bus and she was finishing up something on it. Which, if you know Nikki, she's always finishing up something on it. Now, Nikki didn't just wake up one morning and decide to live in a bus. She's always loved to travel, but not that one-week vacation kind. She wanted to go somewhere for a month or two and she wanted to find out what it feels like to actually live there. So she did it. She did three months in Mexico one year and then two months in Mexico another year. She did a month in New York City and a month out in Oakland. every single time she had a house and she had pets back at her home that she couldn't take with her. Because n she's flying, right? And so now she's paying somebody to watch the house and she's paying somebody to watch the animals. The second time she went to Mexico though, she got a little creative. and I love this one. So she's an artist and she offered up an art residency. an artist could come live in her house for a month, use her studio, use her equipment, use her supplies and And all they had to do was take care of her animals. So she had two different artists come in for a month each. To me, that is super, super smart. And I love that. So if you're sitting home right now and you're saying, I can't travel because I have a dog or a cat or a house, do what Nikki did. What do you have that somebody else would love to use for a month? Still, Nikki knew it couldn't last. Paying for the trip and paying for the house at the same time was just too much. So she started asking herself what a lot of you are probably asking right now. How do I do this? Do I even need a house? Do I get a tiny house? Do I rent? And this is where her family comes in. Her parents, get this. Her parents have been RVing for 20 or 30 years. When they moved from New York to Texas, they were going to live in the RV just until they found a place to buy. They ended up living in that RV for eight years. So for Nikki, living on the road was not some wild idea. To her, it was normal. That's what her parents did. Then one day she saw a school bus on the side of the road, a huge black, flat nosed bus, nothing like the bus she has now. And it got her thinking, I could put an art studio in a school bus. I could go places and do workshops. I could sell my art on the road. And then she let it go and didn't think about it again for a very long time. That happens to all of us. The idea comes, you put it away, and years later it comes right back. Toward the end of 2020, she did something I wish more women would do before they jump. She took a road trip in her car with just Rocket, her dog. She wanted to see what it's like to travel with her dog. It wasn't a COVID thing. Her life barely changed during COVID because she was already self-employed and working from home. She just wanted to know how he would do. And guess what? He did great. So that's a test run. Before she sold anything, before she bought anything, she tried a mini version of it first. She had a car, so that's what she used. I mean, you can try that for yourself right now. You don't need a bus to find out if you like being on the road. So by 2021 she was following all the van life and schooly people on social media, watching everything she could find and making plans. And once Nikki makes up her mind, she goes full speed. She wanted a small bus to start. She ended up with a bigger one, and there is one reason for that. It's called a bathtub. I'm not talking about one of those little RV tubs. What she has is a full-size bathtub. And guess what? It's not hidden in a bathroom. It's right in the middle of the bus. You walk in the door and there it is. The first time I walked into that bus, I, like everybody else, was amazed. Most people pick the rig first and then they figure out what they can have in it and what they need to get rid of. Not Nikki. Nikki picked the one thing she would not give up. Well, there were a few things she wouldn't give up, but this is one thing she would not give up. And so what she did was she built the bus around it. So that works for a lot more than just buses, by the way. Figure out your bathtub. What are you not willing to give up? And figure out how you can build around that. She's an artist and a graphic designer, so drawing out the plans was easy for her. She designed almost every detail. And because she's an artist and not a cook, she didn't put in a stove. What she has instead is this long live edge wood countertop. It is beautiful. It's around ten or twelve feet and it works as a kitchen counter and also an art studio, depending on the day or the time of day. So Why a bus and not an RV? Because RVs all look the same. Beige, swishy stripes, a queen bed, a sofa bed, the same layout, and in her words, they're made out of tinfoil. A bus was a blank slate she could design top to bottom. And she just loves a school bus. Nikki found her bus on Facebook Marketplace about four hours from her house at the end of 2021. She brought a friend who knows trucks and diesel engines to check it out. And he kicked the tires, then he drove it home. Not Nikki. She was too scared to drive it. It sat behind her house, and when she sold the house, it moved to the front of her sister's house. She did not build that bus herself. She designed it and she hired people to build it. And let's just say she'd hired different people today. she did her research online and her choices looked like this. She had the big name builders out in Colorado or Oregon where you wait a year or two, or a shop outside of Nashville in a town she was already going to a lot because she was dating somebody there. That shop mostly built vans. They had done one bus their vans were beautiful, but a van and a bus are not the same thing. In a van, the systems are pretty much the same every time. A bus is a whole different animal, and there's so much more to think about. So she's been fixing things ever since and paying other people to fix things. Her solar panels were fine, but the wiring was all wrong, so she had all of that redone. She had most of the plumbing redone. She moved into the bus in April, and by June she had to move back out because she had a hundred things to fix. So she fixed a lot of it and then she moved back in. If you're about to hire someone to build your rig, ask them one question first. How many of these have you built? Not fans, buses, or whatever it is you're driving. Ask how many of those. Now, the driving. The first time Nikki ever drove that bus, it was two laps around this little circle park in front of her sister's house. But she was thrilled. She says she should have driven it a lot more before the build, because the first real drive was the day she picked it up from the shop. Three hours from home on the other side of Nashville. The plan was a friend would ride along with her and teach her, but the day of he bailed. Now she could have rescheduled, but she didn't. She said, Nope, I have got to get this bus, I can do it. Another friend drove her there and she drove the bus home herself. She looked at the highway through Nashville where you have to cross all the way over to the right and then all the way back to the left, across six lanes of traffic. And she said, absolutely not, no way. So she planned a route on the back roads instead. Smart, right? Wrong. Now, there were narrow lanes, no shoulder, and then a ditch. She had never driven anything that wide in her life, and she was sure she was going in that ditch. So she drove so slow, so slow. But she did it, and now the highway to her is the easy part. That's what doing it scared looks like. She didn't wait until she wasn't scared. She went and she got the bus and she just drove it. Now, I have to tell you about the inside of this bus because I'm a minimalist and Nikki is not. She collects shells, rocks, bones, broken old dolls, art, and anything that catches her eye. It is everywhere in that bus, but it works. It looks like somebody really lives there, and it's really beautiful and things are just placed all over, but it seems to just work perfectly. So how does all of that stay put while going down the road? I had to ask. 'cause that's my my thought. Where is all this stuff flying while hitting a bump and making a turn in a bus? She says it's alien tape. Every piece of art on the walls, everything sitting on a flat surface, all of it is stuck down with alien tape. She buys so much of it, alien tape should actually be sponsoring her. The plants that she has ride in the sink when she drives, and they're not the same plants she started with because she kills plants and Nikki I am right there with you. Okay, so Nikki's got a house, and getting all of this stuff in the house down to the size of a bus was not nothing either. Before the bus was even an idea, she had gone from a 2500 square foot house to a 1300 square foot house. Then when she decided on the bus, she ran a bunch of what she calls studio sales and yard sales. She sold art, furniture, clothes, and a lot of her collection. But books and art supplies, she couldn't let go of. Her sister's garage is still half full of Nikki stuff. And she uses it. She swaps things out. Okay, I'm tired of this. Give me that. Which I think is great because a lot of people will put stuff in storage units, which I'm not a fan of. But then they forget about it. They never go back to it. Nikki will actually trade things out. So it's almost like a moving or living storage unit. She's using the stuff in there. She's moving stuff around. She's switching things out. I think it's good. And she's got my seal of approval on that. So her bus has a name and it's called the doodle bus. Her plan was to draw and paint all over the whole outside. But the bus came with this. Shiny new paint job that somebody slapped on with no prep work and as soon as she started drawing it started chipping off. She was not about to spend a zillion hours on art that was going to peel away. So she uses a silhouette, which is a machine that cuts vinyl kind of like a cricket. She takes drawings she's already done, cuts them out of vinyl, and sticks them on the bus. If a vinyl piece chips off, she's okay with that. If something she had hand drew chipped off, she'd be heartbroken. Every time I see that bus, there's something more on it, which is pretty neat to to meet up with her and check out what's new on her bus. And this is really cool. If you ever fly through Barclay Regional Airport in Paducah, Kentucky, look for the wall with the blue skies, the flowers, and the butterflies. That's Nikki. Her work is on the side of a building in Paducah too. How cool is that. You're standing in an airport in Kentucky looking at a wall, and the woman who made it is out on the road in a school bus. With a bathtub in it. And now you know her. how did Nikki end up at Schoolie Swarm where I met her? Facebook. She was on one of those women nomad groups, Schoolie Women, something like that, and she met Marcy in there. Marcy said, you're in Kentucky? I'm from Kentucky, not far from Paducah. They started chatting, and Marcy is most likely the one who told her about the swarm. They met in person for the first time at the same fall swarm where I met Nikki. If you don't know what Schoolie Swarm is, it's a gathering. People who live in converted school buses and vans and all kinds of rigs parked together for like a week to ten days. You tour each other's buses, you talk about what worked and what didn't, and you make friends that honestly you're gonna keep for years. Most of the swarms are on the East Coast. I go, Nikki goes to as many of them as she can. She even builds and runs their website and registration now. She works with Michelle, the person who runs the schoolie swarm. before she found the swarm, she went to one little schoolie event in Kentucky before she even bought her bus. She was so excited to learn everything. There were three buses there though. None of them were really built out. They just loaded their stuff in and then they went. So she didn't learn anything. She actually said she wishes she had found Schoolie Swarm before she built. She would have seen what was done wrong in her bus. She would have learned what to think about. She would have learned who to hire and who not to hire. So if you're dreaming about a bus or a van or a box truck, go to one of these before you buy anything. Walk through. Twenty buses or vans or other rigs. Ask every question. It costs you a weekend and it can save you a whole lot of fixing later. that's where she met almost everybody she knows on the road. When Nikki and I sat down to talk, we were at Ryan's place in Michigan. And Ryan is another friend we met at that fall schoolie swarm in North Carolina. Her legal address is still Paducah, Kentucky, her sister's house now instead of her old house. She goes back once or twice a year in the spring or the fall to see her sister and her friends. And Paducah is right in the middle of the country, which makes it easy. I'm in New Jersey and I can't just whip across the United States. But for her, she's in Paducah. She's already a third to a half of the way across the country. And so I think she's got a great landing spot personally. Her first two years in the bus, she stayed on the east coast. And she did her winters in Florida. built around the Melrose Swarm, which is in February, and then she would also go to the Nomads Unite. One year she spent Christmas at the Schoolie Homestead in Georgia with a whole crew of people. her summer she went up to New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, where she has friends and family. Then she went to the Virginia Schoolie Swarm and went back and forth to Paducah in between. Two winters ago she went west. She visited her family in Texas first and then she did something she had never done before. She went to Big Ben National Park by herself on her birthday on her scooter. Now, what is so great about that? She had been driving solo for two years already, but every single trip was about getting to the next place, to an event, to a friend, to the family. Somebody was always waiting at the other end. Big Ben wasn't like that. Nobody was waiting for her. She wasn't meeting anybody there. There was no event. She went because she wanted to go. It was all her choice. Driving alone and traveling solo are not the same thing. Nikki figured that out at Big Ben. Nobody picked that She picked it. From there she spent most of the winter in Quartzite, Arizona, a little desert town where a lot of our veers and schoolies spend the winter. Then she went up through California to see friends in Oakland and San Francisco, up through Oregon. She went to a design conference in Seattle. she did a bunch of time in Montana and then the upper peninsula of Michigan, where she spent the last two summers. She didn't go back to Paduca a whole year. I asked her, wasn't that terrifying? Because a lot of people think the way to do this is to just take off with no plan. Not Nikki. Nikki always has a plan. She calls them her anchor points. So she had family in Texas and then friends in Quartzight, Friends in Oakland, the conference in Seattle, the UP for the summer. Those are set. And then what she does is she fills in the time between them. If she had nothing planned and was just floating, to her that would be scary. She plans everything in RV life trip wizard. Every single place she has slept in four years is in there. She plots it out and it tells her, okay, you've got this many days. To fill between this event and that one. Then she changes things. She always changes things, but she's got at least a rough plan. This is one of the easiest things you can do. You don't need the whole trip figured out. Pick two or three places you know you want to be and fill in the middle. That's it. Now, where does she sleep? Remember back in the day when they had the Pepsi Challenge, people were either Team Pepsi or Team Coke. Well, I'm noticing that the same thing is happening with staying overnight at Walmart or Cracker Barrel. Most people are either Team Cracker Barrel or Team Walmart. Very few people say both. Well, Nikki is both. A lot of cracker barrels have parking spots just for RVs and buses, and plenty of Walmarts let you stay overnight too. You check with the store first, but Nikki likes Cracker Barrel better because of the breakfast and because they have that RV parking. She also loves Harvest Host. If you've never heard of it, Harvest Hosts is a membership program. That the basic one runs about ninety nine dollars a year. It lets you park overnight at wineries, farms, breweries, places like that. You're not required to buy anything, but you should, because they're letting you stay. And that's Nikki's problem. She ends up spending so much at the place that she says she could have just gotten a campsite. Which she never does, unless it's free. Okay, almost never. This past winter she went to New Orleans with a friend, Jacqueline, there is nowhere to park a bus in New Orleans. So they found an RV park behind a cheap motel in a sketchy part of town. But it was gated and the owners lived right there. So she felt safe. Plus it was just seventy five dollars a week with full hookups in New Orleans. The catch was it was far from all of the touristy stuff. If Jacqueline didn't have her Jeep, they would have spent a fortune on Uber, and Nikki was not about to park her scooter in the French quarter and hope it was still there when she came back. So how does she pay for all of this? She's a graphic designer. She designs logos, she builds websites, and she sells her art on products. Mostly it's the websites that pay for the road, and she can do that from anywhere, including a bus with a bathtub in it. So if you're interested in Nikki's stuff, you can find her at Nikki May dot com. That's N-I-K-K-I-K-I-K-A-K- M-A-Y dot com. Everything's there. And that's where you can find her on Facebook and Instagram as well. That was Nikki, and that is her journey, her way. If you'd like more road tips and to meet more women worth knowing, Head over to she travelsimple dot com. there you'll find blogs, tips, and more episodes. Until next week, this is her journey, her way.