Not sure if you are aware of just how much water you’re using when you take a shower.  I wasn’t.  Didn’t really care too much, either. Of course having a fixed number of gallons with which to take a shower, do dishes and brush teeth changes one’s perspective.  So we made it a math problem for the girls this week.  Bertle had to take a shower with the drain plugged.  We timed her (10 minutes) and then measured out the water that was in the tub using a gallon jug.  The results: 14 and a half gallons.  She actually turned off the shower just before the timer went off, so we figure the rate to be about 15 gallons every 10 minutes.  We will be working on taking “Navy showers” this week.  Better to get used to it now.

 Now, this will only really matter when we boon-dock.  We figure for the most part we’ll be in campgrounds where we can use the showers and toilets to our heart’s content.  Those nights spent in the Walmart parking lot or the random stretch in the desert–that’s when the Navy showers will come into play.  We can so do this.

Well, my wife has been posting away and I feel like I have been slacking a little on the posts to go along with the conversion part of this adventure.  While we are currently bus owners and I cannot wait to share all we are doing, I thought it might be informative and fun to share some of the adventure in not only finding this bus (researching, asking tons of questions and relying heavily on the bus conversion community) but also a little background as to how and why we got to where we are.

From the beginning…

It all started about a year or so ago when we started thinking about alternative styles of living.  Traveling is actually something we have always enjoyed.  But with the ages of our kids and everything that was going on in our lives it wasn’t up until this past year that a traveling lifestyle would have been possible.  We also had some things to work out in our relationship with God.  As stubborn as my wife and I both are, that took a good amount of work on God’s part to get us both to a place where we were loved and poured into.  I am learning daily to be humble and God has opened my eyes to many of my shortcomings.  I feel like I am finally in a place where I recognize how amazing God’s love and wisdom is and what an idiot I can be.

Initially I was intrigued at getting a sailboat and running up and down the east coast intracoastal waterways for possibly a few months (or a year).  My wife was curiously entertained by my excitement and we started looking at boats.  With our limited budget to buy a boat we quickly realized that it would be torture for our 4 young kids (for us really) to live in a small confined space for a week or two at a time.  Even if we pulled the boat into a marina for a week it wasn’t like the kids would be able to just jump out of the boat and go play in the water all day.

Along the way my wife had shared our spirit of adventure with many.  One of her good friends in Charlotte had mentioned to her that a friend of a friend knew another family who was living on an RV full time and travelling the country.  They kept a really great blog that was consistently updated and truly a lot of fun to read and follow along.  My wife had shared this with blog with me (www.happyjanssens.com) and we were excited again!  Excited for a chance to travel together, Excited that God’s great big world was out there for us to see, Excited that there were families already doing this!!!!  We have found quite a few other families that are living this adventure as well.    (see some of the other herds at the bottom right of the webpage) And these are just some of the ones that are keeping blogs.

How it all Began…

We started looking at RV’s.  Hundred’s of different RV’s.  It was a great market for us.  Many of the major RV companies had melted away and RV’s had slid through the cracks of the fallen economy.  Unfortunately for RV owners it seemed that no one was buying.  We looked at many RV’s in our price range and were finding unbelievably good deals.  There were so many available to us that I really had a hard time deciding on what we really needed that would work for us.  What made it really difficult was that there were so many different types of models, engines, suspensions and systems in RV’s that it was hard to determine what would best suit us.

In all the research that I had done, I was able to narrow it down to 3 things.  1. Safety – We wanted something that was safe to drive, safe to crash.  Something that offered security while we were living in it.  2. Serviceable – We needed something that could easily be serviced. Pieces and parts would be available.  Systems (suspension, brakes, engine, transmission, structural) could be repaired and replaced.  3. Space – Clothing alone for 4 kids (3 girls) can take up an entire bedroom.  Not to mention all the living amenities that go along with them.

There were so many stories of problems with RV’s as I read through many postings.  Problems that could not easily be repaired or parts not available.  Others had stories of having to take it to a specialty shop many states away.  These stories usually came up when I started researching an RV that I thought would be a good buy for us.  Keep in mind that we were looking for a 40′ RV and anything that was less than 15 years old was usually just out of our budget.  Many of the RV manufacturers were now out of business and no longer making parts.  It was typical that the common failing part on the model we were looking at was highly sought after and expensive because of that.  I would assume that this is not the case for all RV’s.  It just seemed that the all the ones that we looked at tended to fit into this category.

I did notice along my reads that there were a few people who mentioned buses instead of an RV.  My initial thought was that a converted bus (not schoolbus) would be very expensive.  When reading through the articles on bus conversions it did seem that a bus had everything we were looking for in our RV.  Buses are much safer because of the frame construction and size, engines and systems in buses are widely available, most system parts were accessible and the bays underneath the bus were much larger and more plentiful than RV’s.  Well, cost aside I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least look at some of the buses available out there.  Who knows?

Over the next 6-8 months we started learning about buses and bus conversions.  Lots to read and the communities of bus owners that are out there were very helpful.  The support we got from the bus community was amazing.  Encouraged by members of the bus community, we took the trip to a bus rally in Florida to see the buses, talk to the owners and educate ourselves. The more we learned about buses the more it started to make sense.

We found that in todays market for bus owners the prices that they were able to sell the buses for was also much less than the amount of money, time, blood and tears that they put into these conversions. This did enable us to look at many buses that were in our price range.  Knowing that we would not be able to find the “perfect” bus we set out many times over the last 8 months to find the bus that best fit us.

In my next post I’ll show you some of the pictures of the buses we did look at and how we got into the bus we have today.

(The pictures of buses we looked at is posted under “The Shell” page – Turtle on over and take a look!)

“When life looks like a puzzle, just remember God’s got the top of the box.” ~Kim Jackson

We just got a puzzle.  We’ve never done a puzzle as a family before.  It’s been fun coming to it throughout the day and placing a piece here or there, watching a beautiful picture emerge–a 3ft x 1 1/2ft photograph of a cottonwood tree against red rock.  We chose it because it looks like a place we’d like to visit when we get to go out west some day.  It’s 1,000 pieces and we figure it will take us months to complete.  This is one thing people just expect to do at the pace of a turtle.

I envisioned cozy grey days with the kids huddles around it, chatting and listening to music as we worked together…date nights with a glass of wine and Burlap to Cashmere, Sean and I across from each other laboring to make an image appear.  So far it’s been mostly like I imagined.  Why haven’t we done this before?

Naturally, I’ve been pondering my friend Kim’s quote this week.  I can’t imagine doing a puzzle without a visual aid of how it’s supposed to turn out.  That’s how it feels to me most of the time, though.  Like you’re faced with so many pieces and they all look like they could fit into this little space but only one is a perfect fit.  If you try to cram the wrong one in to make it fit, nothing else around it sits right.  So I waste a lot of time and energy trying to build onto something that shouldn’t even be there.  I’ve learned that I’ve just got to go to the one who has the top of the box.  If I’m going to have to do this at a turtle’s pace, I’d like to at least be going in the right direction.

So grateful for the time we have with dear friends while we’re here.  Our days have been peppered with visits with the sweet families in our lives.  When we first moved here, the girls fervently prayed for friends–in particular friends that were homeschooled.  We were reflecting the other day in the car how that prayer was answered–abundantly.

american girl doll tea party

after our sleepover with treasured girlfriends

an afternoon at the skating rink

this was clurtle's 1st friend ever in her life...they met when they were teeny tiny

This is what we remember about all the places we go–the people.  The relationships we have and have yet to develop are really our only treasures while here on this earth.

Musings on the subject of friendship by C.S. Lewis :

~“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

~“Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”

~“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”