A bump in the road

A couple of days ago the phone rang and I was too busy to notice that Val’s mood had changed completely after she had hung up. ‘What is wrong?’ I asked after I realised that my girl was moping and looking sort of depressed at the other side of our little three by three room. ‘The mechanic from the garage has just called’, she said ‘he does not want to continue on our bus and wants us to come over as soon as possible to explain why.’

 

It felt like a meteor had just hit me. Why would he say that? Two weeks ago he was fully committed to get our bus ready for inspection and now this? I saw our dream crumble before my eyes. It can’t be true, is what my first thought was, no way this was happening. I had to keep an open mind and hope we could convince him to continue to work. So, the next day we drove up to the garage to ask what was going on.

 

When we arrived, I immediately looked at what he had done so far and I was very impressed with the quality of his work. He had done some great welding and had reinforced a lot of beams; he even had screwed on some good-looking iron plates on a part of the bottom of the bus. He certainly must have worked quite a lot on it already and in everything he had done, you could see his craftsmanship.

 

A few minutes later he walked up towards us and started to explain he didn’t want to continue working on the bus, because it was simply taking up too much of his time, which made him neglect his regular customers. Not only that, if he would continue at this rate, it would cost us a fortune to get it all done. He had already put in 60 hours, at his normal rate this would cost us 3000 euro and he hadn’t even finished a quarter of the job. He is also leaving for four weeks and has not a lot of time when he returns.

 

Can we just drop our dream? Do we really have to? There must be a solution to this? What is the best way to move forward? So many questions popped up in my head, it was hard to get my thoughts straight. We have spent so much time and money in this project and so many people seem to believe in our dream, is it really time to end it?

 

My mind kept rambling on, so I tried to get it on track and think logically; we have come this far, from buying a bus in the US, shipping it, importing it, converting it and finally finding this guy, we are at the final stages of getting this on the road, there must be a way to convince him. Besides, this mechanic is really professional and a super-friendly human being who definitely has a good heart, which is a rare quality in a car mechanic.

 

‘Maybe we need to give you more time’ I said, ‘so you can work on your regular clients and work on the bus whenever there is time left. You could also tell us when you’ll work on the bus, so I can find a couple of people to come and help. I have met some amazing people thanks to this project, who are very skilled and probably willing to help, if we can schedule it properly.’

 

‘All right’ he said, ‘I’ll think about the options during the upcoming weekend, please call me back on Monday.’

 

‘Yes!!’ I thought to myself, ‘Maybe we can come up with a solution after all, we are so close, there MUST be a way.’ So, fingers crossed for Monday and if any of you want to help, please let us know, we’ll be eternally grateful!

 

 

 

 

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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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