Leaving California
For the next couple of months, we travelled from our home in Pasadena to our storage space in Palmdale to work on the bus demo. The weather was dangerously hot, and the demo moved slowly as we navigated the heat and built up our tool inventory.
In the meantime, I left my position as a teacher in favor of something that would give me a better work-life balance. Between writers’ strikes and actors’ strikes in Hollywood, it was clear the film industry was changing as well. So, Mike and I made the tough decision to leave the life we built in California to work on the bus full-time. We sold a lot of our things, put some in storage, and packed up the rest to move to Arkansas and live in the country with family. Mike drove the bus, and I followed behind him in our car with Echo. Sounds simple enough, right? It wasn’t.
The heat was so bad, and the bus didn’t have AC. Mike would step out of the bus at rest stops, looking like he was on the verge of a heat stroke. He decided to devise a system similar to what racecar drivers use just to keep cool. Then, we were just across the state line into Arizona when the bus broke down! Luckily, the breakdown happened right next to a Best Western, and Mike was able to roll into the parking lot on fumes. As it turns out, cam sensors don’t like 113-degree heat. It would take us a few days and a tow truck to the nearest mechanic (back in California) to figure that out, though.
The tow truck hauled the bus back across the state line to a mechanic in California, and we settled in to wait. For the better part of a week, the Best Western next to the Flying J became our whole world. We lived off the free breakfast buffet every morning and whatever the gas station had to offer the rest of the day, because there was genuinely nothing else around for miles. Echo was thrilled with the undivided attention. We were less thrilled.
Here's the thing that made it worse: we had done everything right. We had the bus checked out before we left. We did our due diligence. And then we were sitting in a Best Western parking lot in the Arizona desert, 113 degrees outside, watching a tow truck disappear with everything we had bet on, wondering if we had just made a massive mistake.
That's a feeling nobody warns you about. The moment where the dream you've been building collides with reality, and you have to decide what it means.
We talked about it a lot that week, mostly over gas station snacks and bad coffee. And we kept coming back to the same conclusion: this was just part of it. Not a sign. Not a mistake. Just the road being the road. If we were going to build a life around traveling in a 30-foot school bus, this breakdown was probably not going to be the last one. Better to learn that early.
When the bus was finally fixed and we rolled back through Arizona heading east, something had shifted. We weren't naive anymore about what we were signing up for, and somehow that made us more committed, not less.
Pulling into Arkansas was equal parts relief and excitement. It had been a long trip with a rocky start, but we had made it. The bus had made it. Echo had made it and was already investigating every inch of the property, as if he owned it.
The demo was waiting. The build was waiting. And for the first time in a long time, we had nowhere else to be.
