The waiting game

This morning I opened my Facebook account and as almost every day this past month I have to look at a picture or video of a friend riding powder. I guess this means they are all quite fortunate and/or have worked hard enough to get them into a place in life where they can afford to spend time in the soft beloved white gold. And of course that my circle of friends is quite snow minded. Am I jealous? Well, hard not to be when I see the smile on their faces and especially because I know the flow feeling all to well. On the other hand these posts do remind me of the good times I have spent with them doing the exact same thing. Unforgettable moments one by one and yep those memories also put a smile on my face, so can’t really complain about all those pictures, now can I?

 

Not so long after the smile has gone from my face, questions that have been haunting me for a while pop up into my head: ‘Why am I not hiking to top of all those beautiful white peaks?’ ‘Why in the bloody … are we still not in the mountains with our bus?’ ‘Is this still the right path for us?’ and so on… It is a never-ending loop, which quite frankly can get me quite depressed. Our bus is SO ready to go, everything is ready, we just need a way to get it legally on the road an that seems to be the final (and quite big) hurdle. FRUSTRATION is the word that comes to the mind A LOT these days.

 

Last year somewhere in December we got in touch with someone who imports American vehicles into the Netherlands for a living and we thought we were finally nearing the end of our long wait. In the beginning it looked quite promising; he told us he could probably import the bus via Germany and there was a good chance we could get through inspection by the end of January, but since a week or so, we know that this route will not work because we don’t have an official CO-emission data report of our Cummins engine in this specific bus. By chance I know someone who works at Cummins in Europe and I thought he might find the right certificate and a couple of days later he called me to tell me he had found the certificate with the CO-emissions on for our engine, so I jumped in the air, shouted hallelujah and mailed it to my contact. He replied that although this was the right certificate for this engine, it was not enough; it should be one that has data of our engine matched to our bus and not only of the engine itself. JEEZ! I know. So, we called Thomas Bus and asked if they might have such a certificate. They replied that such a document does not exist in the US, it is not a requirement over there.

 

Back to zero I guess. Luckily, our contact has more than one way to get things done and really wants to help to get our bus on the road. As we are speaking he is looking in to some other options: an inspection in the UK or Sweden, another path in Germany and even a possible alternative way in The Netherlands… The crazy thing is that we would probably have to get a German or Bulgarian temporary license plate to drive to the UK or Sweden. In any case, we are not there yet. He did say he is for 99% sure he can get us on the road, the only question that still remains is when?

 

Hopefully, soon, very soon.

 

In the mean while we have to settle with what the universe is offering us; luckily this includes a short trip to Avoriaz/Chamonix next week, something we are really looking forward to.

 

That’s it that’s all for now, I sincerely hope the next post will be the One!

Regards.

 

Neo.

 

Ps: For some of you, who might not know what the matrix is, just watch the movies

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Great things take time

‘I think you should come have a look on Saturday.’ He said on the phone a few days ago. Apparently, the friendly round faced mechanic who has been working underneath the bus for a couple of days now, kept bumping into more rust than he had expected. So, he needed our opinion on how we wanted to proceed.

Together with our Skilled Nomad, Maarten, we drove to the garage in Hoogerheide and went into the pit underneath the bus to take a look and get a second opinion. Have you ever walked underneath a 12m long school bus? I hadn’t. Well yes, I did lay underneath the bus with a headlamp and my big pregnant belly last summer to look for space for the water tanks but to see the whole bodywork in detail was quite overwhelming.

‘Rust really? Where?’ is what I thought.

 

 

A year ago, when we found the bus on Ebay, we truly believed Jason, the Ebay salesman, who was very confident of the condition of the bus and convinced us that there was not much rust at all. I can’t really believe he deliberately lied to us and in his mind, he didn’t even have to; to US standards this is not much rust, to Dutch standards however, where not more than 20% of the metal can be turned into rust in order to get trough inspection he would definitely be lying. You really had to look closely and high up with a torch to spot anything, but there it was, hidden between the huge pieces of metal, which to me are all the same, you saw what he meant; the copper colored stuff, still stuck in my memory as the never ending parasite covering the floor of the bus, that dirty brown color streaming down Tim’s face in the shower when he spend his days trying to grind that stuff away on the inside of the bus.

That was almost a year ago and so much has happened in the past year, that I couldn’t let negativity slip into my mind when the mechanic told me this was going to take at least another month and would cost somewhere in between five to ten thousand euro to fix. Mainly in man hours, because it is all about getting the rust away in the most gnarly places. When I was thinking about whether or not we needed to stop this beautiful project, stay patient and pump more money into it, not for a second I doubted what was closest to my heart. My mind is not created to host mister negativity.

Even if I was able to let the negativity get the best of me, I still wouldn’t have given up, because this project isn’t just about the end goal. It’s not about that moment I always envision when I think about the bus in the Alps, a bus full of stoked riders chasing pow. It has always been about the road that has led us up to this point; my memory is overflowing with positive moments building this thing, from all the work-awayers we have gotten to know to walking into the bus with a one-day-old baby and lighting the wood stove for the first time. We’ve made it to this point in the story. I’m not ready to give up.

‘Just do what has to be done. At least the main frame of the bus is strong and safe enough. We’ll try to find some extra hands to get rid of the rust. We need to get this bus, our dear Big Bertha, through inspection. As long as we’re on the road before the next winter starts it’s all good’. Is what we told the mechanic at the end of our visit on Saturday.

So peeps, to make a long story short, this is what’s happening:

We’re staying in Belgium just a little bit longer. It might even be till the end of October. In any case, we’ll put all of our energy into the bus but and at the same time enjoy the amazing things we’ll miss when we’re in the Alps: family, friends, Belgian beer, Stoofvlees and all the rest what this amazing and oh so flat country has to offer. Everything always happens for a reason and although at the moment we do feel a bit shitty towards people who already bought a trip during the crowdfunding last year and to our sponsors who have been with us from the start, we are absolutely positive this will happen. Don’t stop believing in this crazy dream we have. We certainly haven’t and we’ll do whatever we can to turn on the engine and start driving towards the snowy mountains with a bus full of stoked riders who will have the privilege to enjoy Bertha’s first big adventure!

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