It’s funny to be starting a travel blog while we’re stationary for 2 months, but this pitstop is an essential part to our overall travels, so it’s worth posting about. We just wrapped up a trip to Florida (which I’ll definitely talk all about in other posts!) and headed back to our home base in New York. We've gotten to enjoy some of our favorite local spots and re-organize ourselves after our first big trip. And we’ve got an ever-growing to-do list while we’re parked!
No matter how much we planned and researched, there was a lot we learned about our bus and living on it while we traveled. There were some disappointments discovered and some improvements schemed up, so we knew we needed to spend some time investing in our tiny home before another few months of hitting the road.
One disheartening discovery was that we had a few leaky spots in our roof. This was a hard blow to come to terms with, since we thought we had done the maximum in our initial build to ensure this exact thing didn’t happen. You can check out our build blog for more details, but we gutted extensively so we could patch and seal everything to prevent these problems. The best laid plans, as they say, but it’s nothing we can’t address now! During this pitstop, we’ve removed the solar to really clean up the roof and then painted the entire top with Henry’s Tropi-Cool. We’ve read a lot about this product working really well for both waterproofing as well as temperature control, so fingers crossed we’ve finally got our leaky roof under control!
Next up on the agenda is fixing our cab A/C. When we bought the bus, the A/C system had been rerouted to exclusively use a large back unit. Since this would have taken up the entire kitchen, it had to go. Unfortunately, whoever modified the initial A/C lines butchered things a bit, so we couldn’t easily divert things back to the cab A/C. We figured “hey! We have insulation, it’ll be fine”...cut to poor Craig in a pool of sweat driving the bus on hot July days. Lesson learned. To the junkyard we went, looking for parts to scavenge. And boy did we strike gold! Not only did we find the 2 A/C lines we needed in great shape, we also found a center console that was a more appropriate size for our cab! It was Emily’s first junkyard experience, and now she feels like a very successful treasure hunter.
Still on the agenda is to install a diesel heater! When choosing our insulation, as well as making our initial travel plans, we had hoped that between advanced insulation and chasing moderate temperatures, we’d be fine without temperature regulators on the bus. However, in our travelling, we learned that even Florida can have some pretty chilly nights, and our silly dogs are not very good at staying tucked in. For the sake of our dramatic and wonderful pups, we have to invest in a heater. Stay tuned for our heater install!
Since we have bigger travel plans this year, we also decided to use this time for general bus maintenance. There’s an oil change on the horizon, as well as some new tires and alignments. We’ve felt pretty grateful and lucky that we ended up with a bus that’s needed minimal mechanical work so far, so it’s worth investing some extra money into keeping the engine and overall bus good and healthy. It’s a tough hit to the budget, but we always knew that some of the money we saved up for this adventure would need to be allotted for bus investments.
It’s exciting doing these deep dives into our tiny roaming home and getting her in tip top shape for our travels this year. We’ve been sketching out our year, and we’re pretty excited for what it holds and excited to have a strong bus to take us there!
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