We Found The Bus!!!

Part 1

Well, on November 11th, and right before the snow started we found our bus!! It was listed on Craigslist.com for probably only four hours before we saw it. It really sounds great and so we called right away. The guy sounded like a decent guy and gave us lost of info.We of course asked as many questions as we could and still feeling good about the bus went ahead and told him that we were interested in buying.

Hayward, CA

We found out that the bus, a 1981 Gillig school bus about 38'-40' ft. long, That was owned previously by a private school. So it has been well maintained. The man who had the bus had just bought it from the school in order to convert it into a party bus. He had all new tires put on and has the bus painted black. It was then that he and his drivers decides that because the bus had a standard shift transmission it was unsuited to what they wanted to use it for. I can just imagine then having to stop on all those hills around San Francisco and not being able to get the bus moving again. The other plus with this bus is that it has had a new engine installed and that now has only about 90,000 miles on it. The Seller said that because the school had plenty of available funds that instead of rebuilding the existing engine or buying a new rebuild the bus was taken to the dealership and had a new manufactured engine and a platinum clutch plate installed. Everything seems to be in good working order in fact the only thing that we have been able to discover that we don't like about the bus is that it is geared for the mountains and has a governor on it that only allows it to go 60mph tops. (That made for a very long ride home, let me tell you! But more on that in a minute.)

The Five Travelers! They will have a lot more room on a bus.

So we dropped everything, left the house a mess and pulled the kids out of school the next day so we could go to Cali and get our bus. (Hayward, California that is.) I made the mistake of telling the kids that we would stop by the beach while we where there, which I now regret. This ignorant desert girl had no idea that there would be a place on the pacific shore that wouldn't have a beach. Silly me. Sorry kids, I am far from perfect. But our first big road trip will be to the beach, promise. Oops, maybe I'd better not promise. That's what got me in trouble the first time.
But anyway back to our story. We actually drove there the long way, down through Las Vegas. We had to stop by the bank on the way. I know that's a long why to go to get to a bank, but that is a story for another time. Everything pretty much went smoothly. Luckily our five kids travel well but even then we had our share of "Are we there yet's" and diaper problems. We got into Cali late and ended up sleeping in the car. I told the kids, "Hey, your dad does it all the time. Now you'll see what it's like." You should have seen the look on there faces then. Priceless and a good lesson too! So we make it all that way to California and survived. What we didn't know was that was the easy part of the trip.