The School Bus Hack


man laying with dog on blow up matress inside a converted bus
Schoolbuses are surprisingly roomy, easily transporting several humans, a dog and camp gear.

This past winter, I bought a bus. A 31-foot, flat-nosed school bus that I purchased from an outfit in Las Vegas. My editor thinks less of me now that I have a bus. I’ve gone from somewhat interesting to very basic. “Everybody has a bus!” he exclaimed when I told him. “Who doesn’t have a bus these days?”

I protested that he was exaggerating. But only a little. I can’t scroll Instagram or drive down the road for more than five minutes without seeing someone’s tricked out #Skoolie or converted Sprinter van. He was even more skeptical when I pitched writing about my bus for this column. “How is it going to be any different from every other bus story we’ve done?” he asked.

“Well, everybody else converts their bus, makes it all nice and accessible,” I said. “We’re not really doing anything to ours.”

“That’s your Gear Hack?”

It is. Sometimes the best hack is the one that requires the least effort.

Option C

The author pictured behind the wheel driving bus

In truth, I never really wanted a bus. I wanted a portable, weather-tight place to keep my family’s camping gear so we didn’t have to spend two days packing to get out into the wilderness for a night or two. But a place to sleep would be nice too. Setting up camp as a wheelchair user takes a while — even longer when you have two young children.

My first idea was to buy a cargo trailer and put gear shelves on one side and bunk beds on the other. My wife, Kelly, thought that sounded like a mobile sauna/hellhole. So, we started looking at truck bed campers. I had visions of wandering around the country like Steinbeck in Travels with Charley. But Steinbeck was unencumbered except for a standard poodle — and truck campers are expensive. Twenty grand for two beds and a camp kitchen, plus I have to play paralyzed twister to get in every night? I think not. An RV was out of the question, too. You’re looking at $60K for something that isn’t covered in mold — twice that if you want a modicum of wheelchair access. And have you ever driven an RV on a forest service road? It feels like you’re in a dryer full of rocks.

So, a school bus. On the whole, school buses have a few things going for them.

  • Compared with most other options for mobile lodging, they’re a bargain. We bought ours — a 2007 rear-engine Thomas Saf-T-Liner — for $9,600. You can easily find a more common 40-foot school bus in the $5K to $8K range. Or less if you get adventurous and start looking on a public auction website. We paid an extra thousand dollars for a conversion package — Las Vegas Bus Sales stripped out the seats, added a mattress, a portable toilet and retitled it under our names as an RV. School buses are typically titled as passenger vehicles, and it’s illegal to drive them without a commercial driver’s license. By retitling as an RV, you can drive one with a standard driver’s license.
  • Many already have a wheelchair lift installed. Self-explanatory — but it did take some time to find a bus with a lift in the middle rather than at the back, which is often the most accessible place to put a bed.
  • They’re sturdy. School buses are predominantly metal, not plastic and fiber composites like most modern RVs and travel trailers. They won’t rattle to pieces on rough roads, and they have higher ground clearance than RVs — both important since we want a vehicle to take into the middle of nowhere, not a KOA.
  • Gas mileage. Surprisingly, school buses get decent gas mileage for their size. Ours averaged about 13 miles a gallon on the drive from Vegas to our home in Washington. That was while pulling a Jeep. When we drove cross-country in my parents’ 30-foot RV, not towing anything, we were lucky to get 10 miles per gallon.

Happiness Is an Empty Shell

When we finally got the bus home, we were all amped up about the things we were going to do: bunk beds and built-in storage and a water system and a composting toilet. Maybe we’d put in a wood stove, and it would all be very hygge. But then Lou, our then 6-month-old daughter, kept waking up after her 45-minute nap just as we started to get to work. Momentum shot. Before we knew it, a weekend had disappeared and we’d removed 12 screws. This went on for a few months before we finally got fed up and aligned our priorities with reality.

young child standing next to man in wheelchair on a lift on the side of a bus
Finding a schoolbus with a lift on the side instead of in the back was a slight challenge.

The point of the bus was to be able to go camping more often, to spend more time outside — not to spend time in a bus. The goal certainly wasn’t to spend two years converting a bus.

We often frame accessibility as a binary — either something is accessible or it isn’t. But accessibility is relative and personal. To me, an empty shell of a school bus is a whole lot more accessible than a brand-new Winnebago Inspire AE or a DIY conversion worthy of an Instagram account. Why? Because I have a job and two children, and I don’t have $380,000 or countless hours to craft the bus of my dreams. I can transfer onto an air mattress and cook dinner on a camp stove much more easily than I can build custom bed frames and a roll-under countertop.

So, we backed off and kept our modifications minimal. Kelly’s dad installed a pair of hand controls that I purchased for $350 on eBay. We bought a generator. At $2,350 this was the most expensive item we purchased, but we spent the extra money for a Honda that is super quiet and powerful enough to back up our house when the power goes out. We bought a portable air conditioner/heat pump ($700) that vents through a window and should keep me from roasting on hot summer nights. I installed a motocross hitch rack ($490) that will carry my Bowhead off-road bike. Kelly added some curtains — old ones we had in boxes in the attic — by screwing them into the metal above the window and adding some ribbons to tie them up when we want to let light in.

The author's wife, child and baby pictures inside bus
Ewan, Lou and Kelly are ready to go camping.

The bus still looks like an empty shell, but that shell is ready to go. We’re dubbing it Cousin Shreddie. Related: If anyone knows an artist capable of airbrushing the side with a life-size Randy Quaid in a bathrobe, hit me up. Cousin Shreddie isn’t Accessible with a capital “A,” but all in, it cost about the same ($15K) as my used Toyota Tacoma.

Shreddie is accessible enough for our lives right now. It has a wheelchair lift, two mattresses and a Pack ’n Play, boxes of camp gear, a portable toilet, and enough leftover space for three mountain bikes, a wheelchair, four humans and one Australian cattle dog. It’s accessible because it’s sitting in our driveway, ready to take us out into the woods whenever we get a free weekend.


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SETH arseneau
SETH arseneau
1 year ago

Smart move on getting the rear-engine unit. Those are MUCH more pleasurable to drive. And rare for a 31-footer, too. Your bus is far more appealing and practical than any of the #skoolie pageantry found on IG. I took the same approach with my crusty old Sprinter van. All function. NO flare.