Bus Update: We’re Still In No Rush

It’s been awhile since we’ve updated you readers on what’s going on with the bus. It’s the namesake of our blog after all, and in case anyone is curious about where we are in this department, we thought it was about time to share some of our current thoughts.

In short, we are still in no rush to get our bus.

Bus travel is a long-term goal of ours, and we’re still very much excited about this goal. But the reason it’s a long-term goal is that we are in no big rush to achieve it right this very second.

Because we have gotten very clear on our goals and values over the years, we’ve been able to really see where the bus might fit into our lives.

I thought a lot about our bus goal actually when I read Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. In this book, Perkins writes about time bucketing, and putting different experiences in different time buckets based on when they’re best suited to happen in our lives.

For us, we feel the bus goal could happen at any time point (well, maybe not in our 80s) and still be well suited for us. We know we want to experience the bus, or at the very least slow travel, but we don’t feel in a huge rush to do this immediately. We don’t feel like we’re missing out.

Below, I’ll go into detail about some of the reasons we are in no rush to get the bus in this current stage of our lives.

We’re still enjoying tent camping

Mr. Dink and I bonded very early on in our relationship over our mutual love for camping. This is actually a huge reason the bus idea even came to fruition in the first place. We started camping together almost immediately, and knew pretty quickly that it was something we would be doing together for a long time. So of course, having met a bit later in life than most of our friends, we started to daydream about how we could continue to get the joy camping brings us long into our older ages, and the bus dream was born.

However, right now, we still love tent camping, and we were reminded of that again this summer.

Specifically, we made some changes to one of our main comfort issues while camping: sleeping. The changes we made this summer made tent camping significantly more comfortable for us. For the first time, we considered the potential that we could keep tent camping for awhile longer. We started to rethink how soon we wanted to get the bus.

Our tent

On our very first camping trip this year, we did our annual trip for my birthday with my brother and sister-in-law.

Since they were expecting a baby (our niece) later that summer, they had finally upgraded their tiny backpacking tent to a larger tent, in anticipation of camping with their new little one.

They set up this new tent, and Mr. Dink immediately fell in love. We enjoyed our old tent very much, but you couldn’t stand up in it, and this fact had been slowly starting to bother Mr. Dink. We found ourselves sore and with aches in our bodies before we were even done with our camping trips from all the stooping and getting up and down from the ground. Being able to stand up in our tent was something Mr. Dink thought would help tremendously with this issue.

I always get a little bit of money from Mr. Dink’s dad on my birthday, and without fail, I always put it straight into my investments. But this year, being Coast FI and closer to Flamingo FI than ever before, I decided to do something different.

This year, I decided camping was more important. We decided to upgrade our tent (in fact, after doing a bit of our own research, we settled on the same tent as my brother).

Our sleeping situation

Now that we had a tent we could stand up in, the next step for Mr. Dink was to build something he has always wanted to build for us: a sleeping platform.

Mr. Dink has never liked simple sleeping pads. He likes to be up off the ground as much as possible, as this helps with his back pain. We’d always bought queen-sized air mattresses, but we had really bad luck with them popping frequently. In fact, just last summer, we had another one deflate so badly that we were on the ground mid-way through the night.

We were sick of having to buy a new air mattress all the time, even when we tried ones that were more expensive. I still had a little birthday money left over after the tent purchase, so I also researched and bought a camping-specific queen-sized sleeping pad. We tried it out first on one trip to make sure we liked it, and when we did, Mr. Dink got started making a custom sleeping platform, fit specifically to the camping mattress we bought.

We are super happy with the camping platform so far, with the caveat that we haven’t camped with our new set-up for more than 1 night in a row (our goal is to be comfortable for 2-4 nights).

But, we camped probably the least this summer than we have in a long time, just due to life being busy, and we’ve already set a goal to camp even more next summer to see if these changes we’ve made (and more we plan to make) will be enough to enjoy camping for longer stays, since that is one of our reasons for getting the bus. We want to be able to go on longer trips.

Miscellaneous amenities

Some other additions we made this summer to increase our camping happiness factor include a fan!

We don’t necessarily love camping in the middle of the summer because of how hot it can get, but in Vermont, you have to take advantage of the summer months. Before you know it, there’s snow and cold and no pleasantry for camping.

This year, Mr. Dink bought a Dewalt fan (not an affiliate link) that he can even use on job sites. It works with one of his many tool batteries, and the fan lasts all night. True glamping if you ask me, but it was totally worth it to stay cool while sleeping, especially when we camped in West Virginia this summer!

Our new tent also has a very spacious vestibule (the space outside the sleeping area of the tent but that is still covered – see pic above) that we can fit a couple of chairs and a table in if we wanted to. Additionally, Mr. Dink can make a little sitting area with a bench or a stool to be able to sit down and take his shoes on and off, which for him is a game changer (the comforts of home away from home, and ways that make camping easier on the body).

Other purchases we may consider before next summer to increase our camping comfort include a screened-in pop up tent and a bathroom tent.

When it’s buggy, a screened-in tent where you can put a few chairs (and even a picnic table depending on how big it is) is crucial. We have always camped with other people who have one when we’ve needed one, so we haven’t had the need to purchase one of our own. But if we continue to put off the bus and go camping just the two of us, I could see us making this purchase.

Whereas Mr. Dink’s biggest concern when camping is the sleeping comfort (being up off the ground and having room to stand up), mine is the bathroom situation. Sometimes our tent spot is a great distance from the bathroom. I don’t mind walking during the day, but I’m slightly over squatting outside at night. To me, having a bathroom right next to our site would be a luxury. I’ve started to research small “privacy” tents like the one linked above that can be used with the bucket toilet set-up we use when we’re camping with no bathroom facilities. This may be a purchase I make for next year. We’ll see!

In short, we’ve taken steps this year to make tent camping more comfortable for us, and next year we plan to experiment with our new set-up and see if these steps we took will make us able to camp for longer trips (2-4 nights).

We still don’t have the best space for the bus

In our first post explaining the birth of the school bus dream, we wrote about how we were filling in our in-ground pool to make space for parking the bus. In a previous post, we shared that the progress was slow.

Because we are in no rush to get our bus, we have been able to take this process at a much slower pace to be able to save money.

Mr. Dink decided early on he really wanted to try to do this task, fill in the pool, on his own. He has done lots of different experiments to see how possible this goal is.

First, he bought a jackhammer for $160, knowing that he would have more of a use for it around the house than just filling in the pool. It was a tool he wanted anyway to add to our property, so he went for it. Sadly, while it works just fine, Mr. Dink decided it was not a sustainable option for filling in the pool. 1) It would take too much time, and 2) it was too hard on his body for the amount of time it would take.

Since he has a tractor that he can move all the pieces of concrete with once they are cut up, he still needed a way to break the concrete up. Since the jackhammer wasn’t going to work, he went back to his research, and he came to me with the next plan.

He decided to rent a machine that would cut the concrete for one whole weekend, at a cost of $246. Unlike the jackhammer, he wanted to rent vs buy this tool because it was a more expensive tool, and he didn’t have much of a use for it besides this one job. By renting it for a whole weekend, he could do as much of the cutting as possible, and then he could work on breaking up the pieces and moving them with his tractor on his own time.

Mr. Dink reports that it was well worth it to rent the tool, but it didn’t work out as well as he hoped. It didn’t cut to quite the depth he expected, so it’s still time consuming to break up the pieces with his tractor. It also was pretty hard on his body using this tool, only slightly less so than with the jackhammer. While moving and breaking up the pieces is easier now than it was with the jackhammer, it’s still going to take him a great amount of effort and time.

This was this summer’s task, and that is where we are now. Now that the winter is almost upon us, and no more work will be done on filling the pool, we can make another plan for next summer.

I keep telling him it might be worth it to go ahead and pay someone, but he wants to try a few more options. Plus, we don’t need it done anytime soon since we don’t have a bus. In the meantime, if we were to find a perfect bus, we could increase the speed of the plan and pay someone/a company to come fill it in.

And speaking of…

We still haven’t found the perfect bus

We’ve always said that if we come across a bus that is exactly what we’re looking for, we’d pull the trigger and make it work fitting it on our property.

However, that hasn’t happened yet, even though Mr. Dink looks all the time. You can read this post to see a full run down of some of the things we’re looking for in our bus.

This summer, we even had the opportunity to buy a bus from a friend! We were so tempted, given that it was already completely built out and came with the extra peace of mind and sentimentality from purchasing from someone we know and trust.

However, we ultimately decided it wasn’t the right decision for us. Looking back, I’m happy we made the call we did. It would have been more of an emotional decision than a rational one. Because we have been so clear on what we want in our bus, we were able to override our emotions and make the decision that was best for us. We ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it to spend way more than we had planned to spend on a bus that was already built in a way we wouldn’t have built it ourselves.

In short, the perfect bus hasn’t revealed itself to us, and we want to (and can) be picky because we’re in no rush.

Lifestyles

Finally, our lifestyles contribute heavily to the fact that we’re in no rush to start our bus dream. For starters, we are still both working full-time. Sure, the bus (when it’s here) may push us to downshift, but neither of us feel the need to do it right now. And especially not to rush into getting a bus that isn’t right for us just because we’re desperate to make this dream a reality. We’re happy with our jobs, for now, and they have allowed us to sock money away in saving for FI so that it’ll be all the easier to downshift when we do have the bus.

Also, I haven’t hit my financial goals yet. I’d still really like to hit Flamingo FI (half your traditional FI number) before downshifting to part-time work. However, we could still easily get the bus, if the right one comes up, when we’re still working full-time.

While we’re working full time, we’re also enjoying traveling more. We know it would be difficult to slow travel while working full-time. So for now, while we don’t have the bus or the means to slow travel, we are taking advantage of shorter travel opportunities, especially now that the world has continued to open back up post-pandemic. We just had a great time in North Carolina for our good friends’ wedding, and we are in the midst of planning a belated honeymoon/40th bday (Mr. Dink) trip for early next year.

Last but certainly not least, our first (and maybe only) niece is 4 months old now, and we are absolutely loving getting to be around to watch her grow. We see ourselves wanting to travel for long periods of time on the bus, so for now, we are really happy being close to home near our family and community. For right now, we want to be home more than we want to be on the road. This will likely change as our niece grows up, as our parents get even older, and as we downshift our work. But for now, our lifestyle is one of the factors at play in our decision to be in no rush.

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There you have it! A long overdue update on where we’re at with our bus dream. We’ll keep you posted! What questions do you have in the meantime?