The Why behind our bus

The reason we selected a 31ft pusher bus over all the other options

“Why did you go to California to pick up a school bus? There are school buses right here in Texas!” That is pretty much the most asked question we received when we told people about our trip. The answer to this question is not as straight forward as one might think…

We chose getting a school bus over buying an RV because we do our utmost best to live debt free. An RV for 5 is simply not in our budget. Having done all the numbers over and over again we figure that we can make a bus purchase and customizing it to our needs for less money (but yes, a whole lot more time and hard labor) than purchasing a new or used RV that meets our needs.

The process to get a school bus took two whole years of research. In which time the average used school bus price went up by almost $1000… Sure, one can still get a bus at auction for $500, but you get what you pay for. Buying a school bus like that, adding lots of time and money to turn it into a six wheel adventure only to have it break down at every corner may not be such a sound idea.

Doing a conversion surely is not for everyone. The thought of being on a school bus alone puts some people off. Since we homeschool and thus our kids do not ride on school busses, they have no aversion to them. I cannot speak from experience but there surely are some stories I have heard from people who have very bad memories about being on a school bus. And that could obviously influence an adventure like ours negatively right from the start.

If one does decide to try a conversion, the first step is to determine what type of school bus to look for. There are several questions you should ask yourself:

• What do we want to use it for?  (In our case an RV conversion for a family of 5)
• Where do we want to use it?      (State and National Parks Nationwide, weekend trips in Texas)
• What do we want in the bus?     (5 sleeping spaces, kitchen, sitting area, shower and bathroom)
• When do we want to use it?       (Year-round)
• How do we want to use it?         (As a traveling, non-stationary bus)
• What type of bus do we want?  (Flat nose, rear engine)

When we first started with the school bus idea, we were looking at a 40ft Dog-nose. The big All-American yellow school bus. Just awesome! Having grown up in a nation where school buses do not exist – this was the dream school bus! But it appeared not to be the right choice for us…

An RV conversion for a family of 5 leads to space requirements. So how large does a bus need to be to comfortably go camping and touring around the nation with three soon to be teenage girls? Well, 4300sqft would do nicely! But they don’t make buses of that size. A 40ft bus then. Sounds great, nice and roomy, but now question #2 “where do we want to use it” comes into play. If we look up the maximum length allowances for State and National Parks, you will see the recommendation is to stay between 27 and 30ft. There are not many 40ft places available in such parks. So now we are looking at a lot smaller bus. To circumnavigate some of the loss in length, we now (very unfortunately!) have to move away from all dog nose buses. The easy engine access of a dog nose just costs us too much length. Bummer. Plus this takes 95% of used school buses that are available in Texas out of the equation….

At the high end of the park limitations, we come to a 31ft bus. (Since skoolies are normally measured by windows, this means a 10-window bus) We laid out many different footprints to see if we can fit the answers to question 3 all in this length of bus. And we can. It will be a little tight, but if we think outside the box and make space optimization our goal, we can make it work.

We want to use the bus all year round. In Texas, that means in extreme heat and humidity. So we need insulation and a powerful air conditioning. Instead of buying an add-on airco, we looked for one that has existing airco (and heat) that is strong enough to cool this steel tube down. If after the drive we need to supplement air, we hopefully can do so with a little inventive wiring.

Using the skoolie as a traveling bus means that we need to look for something very special; six good tires and a good engine that will last. There are many discussions on the latter at skoolie.com. The opinions are all over the place, so we went with one we know: Caterpillar Engines. We know the Cat C7 has had some issues, but both of us have worked with Cat engines thus we went with this rugged no frills engine instead of the more advanced, but very technology and electronically sensitive Mercedes-knock off Detroit Diesel (DD) Engine. Texas heat and aging electronics is not a good combination. But only time will tell if we made the right choice.

A traveling bus also needs comfort for the driver and those sitting in the front part of the cabin. Buses are not known for their quietness, so we want an engine away from the driver’s seat. The options were either a dog nose (but we cancelled that one already) or a flat nose bus that does not have the engine right next to the driver. This automatically leads to the rear engine (pusher) bus.   

A bus engine has typically 160000-250000 miles on it when they are taken out of service. A low mileage is nice, but the main reason those low mileage buses are taken out is because the EPA improvements are too expensive to maintain them. Not something a family of 5 wants to deal with either. The average school bus can run 500000-700000 miles so getting a bus with 210000 miles on the clock is not that strange.

And then we finally get to the very first question we were asked. Why California??? Well, the answer is actually quite simple. Texas has a lot of humidity. Buses in the north deal with salted roads in the winter. Either way, those are a recipe for rust. And rust is not a great friend of vehicles made out of steel. Hence, we wanted a bus from the desert. Dirt can be washed off, rust cannot. Our bus actually came from Clark County, Nevada, but either way, it is a dry heat. So the bus has great airco but no rust.

Now add frequent flier miles, car rental credits and hotel points and we could make this trip for free! Until we started to drive it home and had to stop at the gas station with $4.15/Gallon Diesel…3 times….

There goes the budget….