Behind the Bus

Reykjavik, Iceland, June 2017.

Four friends and I were on our way home from different places in Europe. After spending the school year studying language, experiencing culture, and exploring the continent, we had one last trip planned. Our previous travels that year had pushed the boundaries of our traveling expectations; tighter connections, longer journeys, and smaller accommodations. We’d learned to stretch our understanding of what it was like to live on the edge while expanding our cultural experiences…but this trip was going to be unlike anything else we’d put ourselves through to date.

My best friend, Alex, and I had rented a VW California camper van for a week and dropped dozens of pins around the island of Iceland with the goal of hitting every spot we could. The three girls we convinced to join us didn’t know what they were getting into but were down for the adventure. We piled in the van at the airport and set off on what is still one of the most incredible weeks of my life. This was my first taste of what it was like to live tiny and live on the road.

Three summers later, the same friend Alex and I threw our mountain bikes into his quickly converted Ford Econoline and drove from California to Utah to spend two weeks on a thrilling tour of the American West. From the Rockies to the Tetons, we tried to find the trails with the best views and the flowiest of lines all while showering in rivers, lakes, and the occasional relatives home along the way. This was my second time living on the road, below my means, pushing the limits of what I previously thought was a livable situation.

While neither of these experiences were sustainable by any means, they both opened my mind to a world of living on the road that drew me in deeper and deeper the more I looked into the reality of bus/van life.

I’ve always been a crafty/handy person, but never really had experience with a full scope project. During the fall quarter of 2019, my senior year of college, I engrossed myself in bus life content and thus was born my dream of building my own bus one day. I was in the middle of a broad scope outdoor adventure photography publication that was my senior thesis project and I spent nearly every weekend driving all over Northern California with my friends climbing, cycling, skiing, hiking, and photographing it all.

I built the bad habit of spending my time in Finance class on resell websites looking for used busses. One day, I found one on Facebook marketplace in Santa Cruz and decided to go check it out that weekend. I drove down to SC in my 2000 Subaru and drove back in my newly acquired 2000 Ford/BlueBird short bus.

The Bibia Bus had begun.