This is a good thing, as I am becoming less and less “digital” every day anyway. I thank everyone for following along and feel free to stay tuned to the RSS feed as one day we may again be in a position to share the journey. That day simply isn’t this one, or any foreseeable ones in the coming future.

Seriously, sinceriously in fact, thanks for all of your comments, input and reading. It’s more fun to share but sometimes disappearing is an act you just have to follow.

No truer a statement would reveal itself as reality.

From my three months experience with living in one of these little tin sardine cans, I can safely say that they are not for anyone who’s afraid to have greasy fingernails, busted up hands and a thinned out pocketbook. Some truths:

Breakdowns

This is simply something that will be on your plate at all times. Our bus has a rebuilt engine and runs pretty well, when it’s running. But there have been many a morning when I’ve had to get into the engine and tinker, I’ve lost as much blood busting my hand open trying to reach into that small motor compartment as the bus leaks oil, and our local VeeW Unlimited repair folks find the old girl parked in their lot when they arrive in the morning enough to know her by name. The good news on this front is that there are plenty of parts still around for these old girls, in my experience, and if you’ve got even a sliver of engine inginuity in you (I had absolutely none when I first bought her), you’ll be able to do alot of the work yourself. Just find yourself a copy of the How to Keep Your Volkwagen Alive book and read, read, read yourself to sleep.

Cooking, Cleaning and Food Storage

If you like to cook lavish meals with loads of ingredients and all chopped up veggies, tasty sauces, and elegant layouts, forget it. There’s about as much counterspace as an escape pod sent from Krypton and given that you’ll likely have two burners maximum on what is essentially a camping stove, grilled cheese sandwiches and hot soup are about as fancy as it gets. We’ve learned to eat raw: fruit and veggies, some good bread and cheese can make for excellent meals and an incredibly healthy lifestyle. Oh, and don’t forget the chocolate. Lots of chocolate. And beer. And wine. And coffee. Coffee with Jameson in it. And just Jameson. Cigarettes help, too.

There’s also not a whole load of storage, so you’ll probably need to decide between having boxes of pasta around or underwear.

And the clean up is a pain. When I’m riding alone, I can keep her somewhat spic and slightly span, but add the boy or the lady, or both, and you’ve got a recipe for muddy floors, cluttered cabin space and all around messy. I like to live in the mess that my loved ones make though, and don’t mind a quick sorting every couple of days.

Exploration

How about some good news, you ask? Well I’ve got plenty of it. As far as mobile living goes, you can’t really beat a bus. Not even a Class B RV can fit as easily into a parallel parking spot as the bus, and so we are basically unlimited as to where we can go. If you can get there by car, you can get there by bus.

Gas Mileage

My house gets 26mpg. The end.

Social Butterflighting

Open the side door, sit there with a hippy girl or a cute little blue eyed 8 year old and you’ll have every interesting person in a quarter mile squared radius coming up to you. “Ah man, I always wanted to do that.” “Reminds me of my younger days!” “What?! You live in that?” Good times.

The Lifestyle

Living in a bus is not like living in a home. It is best suited, in my opinion, for those who prefer to be outside rather than in. In fact, you really can’t live in the bus if you’re going to be a tribe (as opposed to a loner type). You’ll want to get out around the fire, wander the beaches, hike up a trail or relax in a coffee shop.

Simply “the Feeling”

When another bus owner drives by, you both wave. Every.single.time. Hasn’t failed yet and that’s a great feeling. The way people look at you, teenage kids motioning for you to honk the horn, old hippy types smiling as you go by, it just makes you happy to be living this sort of life. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a decade now and whether it lasts another week or another much, much longer period, I am incredibly thankful for the experience.

And that’s what it’s all about, experiencing what you want to grab ahold of in life.

Any other questions? Feel free to ask in the comments ’cause this is certainly a conversation I love having.

We slept in the car the night we arrived, Texas still a warm still of a night kind of place and Tristan was already asleep when we got there, so why bother with the hassle of waking him up only to sleep in a similarly uncomfortable cheap motel bed. My eyes closed somewhere just before midnight.

6am, Texas time. I wasn’t trying to adjust to the time zone, my old time zone but somehow Texas didn’t feel like home at all anymore. I thought of the brief moments, maybe only days or maybe a month or so, when I thought I’d be a Texan. Austin maybe, or Marathon, complete opposite sides of the big state and completely different lifestyles but the desert, the hill country, it was all so pleasing to me. Finding myself pleased, I laughed, was probably my downfall in that whole situation. Comfort is comfortable, sure, but complacency is dangerous and I’ve worked too hard to dodge it to allow it to suck me up into it’s too easy to do belly at this point.

We saw Olivia, the wonderful woman still filling what was once all of our old RV. She’d decorated it up to suit her exactly, ribbons and bells and post it notes reminding her to drink water and everything about it was dripping with who she was, both who she’d always been, even if it had been on hold while we were all together, and who she was becoming. She came walking across the Marathon Motel and RV Park dirt lot wearing a short skirt and high boots, looking like a desert child. Tristan beamed and the two of them walked around the sleepy, miniature version of what modern America would consider a small town, this more of a wide spot on Highway 90. I tried to fit our old life into as few boxes as possible, the KIA had great trunk space but whatever I took would eventually need to be slimmed down again, and probably again, Goodwilling the excess. But I wanted to complete the task, get a few minutes of Marathon in for myself, and get back to Colorado.

Prior to buying our bus, I had never had a real desire to get to Colorado before. It’s one of the most gorgeous, lavish states but I always saw it as a drive through on my way to other destinations. Under that beating, suntanning desert sun though, it was the only place I wanted to be.

My scooter, Stella, had blown over in a wind storm but was more or less fine, save for a busted reflector on the front tire well. I started her up and the one mile ride into town was over in only a minute. Marathon was awfully sleepy for noontime, only a few locals were wandering the streets and barely any of them the more socially open types I’d come to find as more friends than acquaintances. A good friend who makes tacos at the only coffee shop in town was in Austin sorting out some new venture, but the shops owner, a woman with many names of which I prefer “Boots” the best, came out to chat and fixed us up breakfast like I certainly couldn’t complain about. She offered to let me park Stella at her place for a couple of months until I could sort out what I’d do with the old blue girl.

And then it was over. Tristan and I were back in the KIA, 90mph back up empty West Texas roads, through Balmorhea’s lush green hills with black pitch night rock cliffs peaking out, my favorite drive perhaps in all of America, through the Pecos, New Mexico’s long endless desert stretch (something about New Mexico just doesn’t sit right with me…). A $25 motel room, a few hours sleep. A phone call from my lady in Colorado assuring me that everything was grand, good and going as planned. Wake up, drive some more. A phone call reveals that my laptop, a MacBook Pro which serves as the bread winner in our little bus living, was too broken to fix at the Mac Shack, a local Apple IT type fix it shop, and would need to be sent in to Apple proper to get the repairs done. Five to seven days around the holidays means I won’t see my computer, or a paid work hour, until 2010. I panicked for a moment, stopped in at the first Apple Store I could find on my way home–Colorado Springs in a massive, busy-as-the-holidays mandate strip mall–and applied for credit. Denied. Damn medical bills and my inability or lack of inclination to pay them.

No big deal, though, I thought. In an hour we’ll be back in Loveland, back at the bus. In four hours we’ll be up the mountains and Tristan, myself and our lady friend sitting around a pot belly stove of a fire sipping Stone IPAs and smoking cigarettes over detailing the every minutes of the last three days of our lives spent apart.

So I mustered up the gumption to just go and register the vehicle in Colorado, though I think I had wanted to ride Texas plates, it wasn’t going to happen. I had been living in the Rocky Mountain State (that’s really what it should be called, “Centennial State”, wtf?) for three months and three days, so I met residency requirements. $250 later and Tristan and I are now Coloradoans (a word that hurts my fingers just to type, so awkward and round and vowely) now, legally anyway.

Of course, we’ll always be Pennsylvanians, Tristan a true blooded Pittsburgher and myself a Nanty Glo boy, at heart. The Steeler Nation doesn’t care what your license plate says as long as your blood bleeds black and gold.

That was only partially serious…

His math sheets are nearly flawless, his pictures drawn with realistic fantasy, his reading quick and the words each understood all through his brain. He’s merely 8 years old but what wisdom and understanding, what culture and vision he has is enough to overflow the gray matter cups of many whole families. He’ll be more than I am at my age, more than I’ll ever be by his death.

Still though, he’s a child now and while I’d love to see a companion in him for travels and tribulation, he craves his fellow children, wishes for playgrounds and a dog for a best friend and routine. I am not aware of the appeal of routine, personally, but if we are alive and conscious, and consciousness is the ability to determine right from wrong through self-awareness and the realization that others exist in the same manner, then my pursuits as a parent are the struggle triangular between teaching through example, minimizing tears in his biggest blue eyes, and not trading one life for another.

So is the metaphor of our lives, friends. We are young, we are unencumbered by the trapdoor fixtures of debt and compromise. Fresh as the fruit we fill our stomachs with, green as the smoke this Colorado countryside has colored legal, flirting danger safe as the quarter inch of metal between the dry winter heat of a propane powered gift and all of zero degrees Dr. Fahrenheit outside do we exist. Money is heavy rich in bank accounts and then money is $27 thin one day as we choose between chance and lottery what our today will mean for our tomorrow. Fortune is in our favor, but fate is nothing without plans and action; those three sisters spinning