The bus dream fell flat. We took it for a front end alignment a couple of days after we bought it and the mechanics found a lot of front end problems due to rust. They quoted me $2000 in parts alone.

We decided to sell at that point even though we knew we would have to take a big hit on it since we couldn’t sell it dishonestly. At first I felt a lot of guilt about buying this bus without having it inspected first but the man who sold it to me said his mechanic looked at it and said it was in great shape. I later found out from someone else on Facebook who saw our ad selling it that he had looked at it when the original seller had it listed that the seller knew it was in bad shape. I guess I need to be less trusting going forward. I like to think that people are honest and good but not everyone is like that.

Back to selling the bus… We bought it for $3500 and we ultimately sold it for $1000. Very sad. But we sold it honestly and the guy who took it planned to use it for interior and engine parts because he already has a bus just like it. It’s a relief to have this big (20 foot long) mistake out of our driveway.

The good news is our old dream of taking the pop-up still lives. We stopped the sale of the pop-up and are still planning our trip. I hammered out a rough itinerary so we could see how long the trip would take us. My best guess is 54 days.

We plan to see many national parks, tourist stops and 13 states. We also will probably leave later in March than we originally planned both to get better weather and to try and meet up with the kids’ cousins at the Grand Canyon.