In the middle of the effort to get the house ready for listing, purging many of our possessions and packing to move across the country, we made a highly questionable choice.
In the course of visiting with Tammy's parents, they mentioned that their church had a bus that wasn't being used and they were looking to donate it to one of the places that take junk vehicles for free. After they left, we talked about the bus and that maybe it would be a way we could move some of our things to Tennessee (plus we hate to see good things get scrapped). We were really apprehensive that this could be a giant time-suck and distract us from everything that had to get done in the coming months, but called Tammy's parents to see if we could at least look at it.
The next day we met them at their church and to our surprise, the bus was in really good shape and seemed to have really low miles on it. Using Tammy's bus driving experience, she drove it around the parking lot a bit, then we spent time pushing all the buttons and looked briefly at the mechanical parts.
We asked Tammy's parents to see if the church would be willing to make us a deal on it, which we heard back later in the week that they would gift it to us! We eagerly agreed to take their offer and made plans to pick it up on the weekend - then suddenly thought "what have we just done?" We know nothing about bus maintenance or how to tell whether it is road-worthy enough to travel across the country, but concluded that "nothing ventured, nothing gained" - or in the words of the immortal Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take".
Tammy bravely drove the bus from Kent to Maple Valley, with Don following behind in the Jeep. As we neared Wilson Hill (big downhill into Maple Valley), Tammy pulled over because a buzzer started going off. After checking for anything obvious, she chose to drive it the rest of the way home *yikes*. Later we learned that the buzzer was only from one of the emergency windows being not closed tightly *whew*. Pulling into our driveway, we realized how big it actually was! Fortunately we had enough room beside the garage to park it temporarily...after a little branch trimming.
With a bus in our inventory, we reimagined how we could transport everything to Tennessee, not needing to spend $20k on U-Haul trucks. After ruling out several scenarios, we decided to run with the bus for the majority of our boxed items and buy/rent trailers for the big items (couch, washer/dryer, refrigerator, riding lawn mower, etc.). With this plan, we would have the bus, the Suburban towing the old car, the RV towing a trailer and the Jeep towing a trailer. Unsure about whether this would give us enough room and whether the Jeep could haul very much, we decided to let this plan gestate for the time being.
Our first hurdle was to get the bus title transferred to our name and get it insured - both of which presented unique challenges. We started with the title, which on our first attempt the WA DOL couldn't put a value to and required an appraisal. Where do you get an appraisal on a bus? After a bunch of internet research, and help from our
friends the Gennarellis, Don called a local charter bus sales company (NW Bus Sales) who agreed to provide an appraisal via email. After a bit of massaging using Word, we had a viable document to present to the DMV. This worked like a charm, although there was a few tense minutes where everyone in the DMV office contemplated whether the document was "valid" as an appraisal. When it came down to the final title transfer fees, the total came to just over $200, including the $0.09 we had to pay in tax (since it was "gifted" for $1). Now we actually owned a bus!
Since it was legally ours now, Don set out to determine how much work it would be to remove the seats to make more storage space inside. The first seat took quite a bit to get loose, but after learning a couple tricks, the rest (except the two with under-seat heaters) came out by the end of the day. This unfortunately added to our pile of things to get rid of. Along with our other junk metal we took the seats to the scape yard and came out $100 ahead, yay!
We moved on to solving the insurance possibilities for this 1990-church bus-converted-to-moving-truck vehicle. We researched several companies including our own Farmers insurance and came up empty handed. In the end Farmers did ultimately point us to a collector car insurance company named Hagerty. After providing some details about the bus and waiting on their underwriting, they were willing to provide full coverage for the bus, including roadside assistance, for less the $300/yr - we thought for sure it would be WAY more expensive. Within a couple days we had paid the premium and received a proof-of-insurance card - now we could finally drive it.
Our first trip out was to teach Don how to drive the bus so we could share the cross-country driving. Channeling her very best Tahoma SD Transportation training instructor, Tammy rode shotgun while Don drove the bus all around Maple Valley. With only a couple minor infractions, we made it back home and the bus seemed to do fine (a few minor mechanical things revealed themselves but were quick to fix).
The second trip out was to try driving the bus up/down some real grades, so we headed to Snoqualmie Pass to see how it handled that hill.
Along the way we stopped in North Bend to figure out how to fill it with diesel. We went to Ken's Truck Stop and expertly pulled into one of the truck pumps, but when we got out to fill the tank (on the passenger side), we found that the pump had no place to pay and no screen to turn the pump on - weird. We jumped back in the bus and looped around again, waited in line and pulled into another pump, then got out to find this pump looked the same. Tammy went in to find out how we needed to deal with this and came back with the answer - we need to pay at the driver's side pump, take the hose out and lay it on the ground, then use the passenger side pump.
By the time we got this much figured out, we were already a bit flustered as there were trucks in line behind us. Then the opening for the tank was really hard to get the nozzle into and diesel kept spilling out as we filled it (and we had no idea how big the tank was). We stopped after what seemed like forever and assumed we must have gotten it filled, but as we drove away, the tank showed just a bit above half. We humbly took our lessons and headed up to the pass.
The bus handled well on the freeway, but was clearly no rocket when it came to getting on the freeway. As we started up the pass, we realized that it really only had one speed when it came to uphill - SLOW. We had a glimpse of this when going over Tiger Mt., but on a long grade we could only ever get to ~40mph. We eventually made it to the top of the pass and turned around to headed back down. This was a bit nerve-wracking as neither of us had experience on a downhill grade with something this big, plus we didn't really know how well the braking worked or if they would get too hot. We took it slow with the hazard flashers on and had now issues at all (it even stated raining pretty hard to add to it). We got off in North Bend and switched drivers, but easily made it back home now felling better about our odds of this plan working.
After having done an initial pass at packing the garage, we were able to pull the RV out and back the bus all the way in. The bus surprisingly fit with just a foot to spare - it was like the garage had been built for it :-). Putting the bus inside was great for a few reasons: First we could more easily give it a look-over mechanically; second we could have it out of sight when we listed the house/held and open-house; and third it was easy to load boxes into the bus regardless of weather and with lots of light. This last point turned out to be a real advantage as we could now moved all the staged boxes in the house out into the bus to clear up the rooms. This approach kept us from needing to wait until the last minute to rent the trucks/trailers to load pack for the move.
After Don did a basic visual inspection of the engine and under the bus, we still weren't totally confident that it was ready for a 2,500 mile trip. Without any good resource for bus maintenance (Don tried to convince Tammy to ask the Tahoma mechanics about it but Tammy did not want to), we contacted NW Bus Sales again to see if they took private client vehicles. Although that came up "No Sale", they did provide a recommendation for a guy name Gary at GLM Charters, who kindly fit us into his schedule on very short notice. Don drove the bus in Hwy 167 traffic to Puyallup, ending up on some narrow backroads to find Gary's shop. We left the bus overnight, anxiously hoping not to hear that it needed too much work to make it road-worthy. The next morning we heard that they'd finished the safety inspection and we could pick up the bus around Noon. The bus passed with flying colors - no major issues that needed immediate attention and only a couple very minor items that they just took care of. Gary was great and we learned (as he tried to recruit Tammy to drive charter busses for him) that he'd actually been a mechanic for Tahoma SD Transportation a long time ago - small world!
With a clean bill of health, we took care of some "comfort items" in the bus, adding a 12V lighter outlet for phone charging and a cupholder for those road trip drinks. These were quick and inexpensive to get from Amazon and easy to install. With less than $500 invested into our new bus, we were ready to take it cross-country! But there was something missing...something to signify our coming journey...something poignant...something fun - what we needed was a sign.
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