Perd the Skoolie
It all began when my husband and I decided to purchase and convert a short school bus into a camper during the pandemic. We were supposed to take a trip in a rented camper van for my birthday and the plans fell through because the previous renters totaled the van. This got us thinking… why not do it ourselves?
So, we packed up our car and with money in our pockets, headed to a small town in Tennessee. On the way there our drive was rerouted off of the highway and onto small mountain roads, the owner of the bus threatened to sell it to someone else, but after about six hours (two more than expected), we made it! We test-drove the bus, handed over the money and made the long drive back home in the dark.
And so our journey began…
We worked on the bus day in and day out for months. Gutting it, cleaning it, stuffing it full of Havelock wool, and slowly putting it back together again. We learned everything as we went - building a bed, a kitchen counter with a sink and running water, a dinette area turned couch… the bus had it all. At least to us it did. I installed solar panels on the roof and with the help of my dad, I set up an inverter, solar charge controller, and a shore power plug that we could use when we didn’t have enough solar stored up.
In December of 2020, just 3 months after purchasing the bus, we set out to paint it. It was such a daunting task that we had continued to put off time and time again. After a few days, a lot of rain, and some patience, we had a beautiful Sunburst orange and white school bus. All we had to wait for was our licence plate to come in the mail and we were set for our Christmas trip to Shenandoah National Park.
We had a wonderful first trip in our skoolie… but in true fashion, it didn't go as planned. We made it up to Cherokee, NC a little over an hour after it started to snow and as we started ascending Highway 441 into the Smokey Mountains. As night began to fall and as we were pulling up to the visitor center, there was a sign saying that the road through the Smokey’s was shut down due to icy conditions - okay, so where do we park for the night?
After quite a bit of driving around and realizing that if we made it down any of the driveways into a campground, who knew how long it would be before any of the ice melted and we made it back out, we finally pulled into the Cherokee Food Lion parking lot for the night. It was 9F that night. We hadn’t yet installed our solar setup and we didn’t have anywhere to hook our shore power to, so we were going to have to survive the night and make sure our pup did too. We ate hot dogs cooked on the propane stove and hopped into bed. The first night was nothing like I had ever imagined it would be. I barely slept a wink.
The next morning we gassed up the bus and headed down a small country road through national forest land toward Chattanooga - somewhere a little warmer. We cooked breakfast in a recreation area parking lot alongside a snowy Oconee River. It was a dream. Once we made it to Chattanooga, we spent the first night in a parking lot and enjoyed dinner at a local restaurant, the next day we headed to Raccoon Mountain Caverns and Campground.
We loved our little bus, Perd. Since we sold him in early 2022, he has been called home by three other families.
