Ten Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Living in My Converted Shuttle Bus

We moved into our shuttle bus in late 2021, but we moved into our first van in the first month of 2018 - I’d consider us pretty seasoned nomads at this point in our lives. But I remember the absolutely huge amount of unanswered questions I had after having purchased our first van while planning for our inaugural trip. There are a lot of similarities between vanlife and buslife, and I feel like the questions I had would have been the same, no matter what vehicle we had started out in. Here are the answers to those things, plus a few buslife-specific things that I’ve learned already.

There are plenty of places to park overnight, so long as you’re respectful

This was my biggest concern in the beginning. We had purchased our van to tour full-time (we’re musicians), and I was deeply worried about regularly finding places to sleep while we were on the move. As it turns out, there are maybe a handful of cities in the entire country that we’ve visited that haven’t had plenty of parking options available for us. I’ve used a combination of apps to find parking, including AllStays, iOverlander, Campendium, FreeCampsites.net, and a good old fashioned Google search every now and again.

That said, being respectful at the places you find to park overnight is THE paramount rule of boondocking in parking lots. No camp chairs out, no extended stays, if you have a generator use it as little as possible, stay self-contained, dispose of all your trash, and by all means try to patronize the business you are parked at. (Get groceries at Walmart, get gas at a truck stop, get breakfast at Cracker Barrel). The travelers who don’t do these things are gradually making things harder for the rest of us who greatly appreciate businesses who allow this kind of parking. Don’t be one of the bad ones.

There’s also a myth going around that converted vehicles aren’t allowed at established campgrounds. I can tell you from three full years of living in a 20+ year old box van that was not exactly friendly looking on the outside that this is essentially untrue. There are some high-end resorts and 55+ communities that will most definitely restrict entry to certain rigs and occupants based on all kinds of criteria. But we’ve stayed in state and national parks, KOAs, and private campgrounds with no issue probably hundreds of times. We prefer remote, undeveloped camping in our bus, but I’m not the least bit concerned about being let into nearly any established campground if we ever wanted to stay at one.

Finding water isn’t that hard, either

I was also really concerned about this early on, and funny enough it’s one of the questions I’m asked most often by people just starting to research the lifestyle. But finding water isn’t any harder than finding parking, and a lot of the apps I listed above actually have filters to search by locations with water available. Lots of gas stations - truck stops specifically - will have potable water to fill your tanks with, and that is usually the go-to option for us. In fact, the majority of places with a public dump station will have drinking water available as well.

In the southwest US, you’ll find lots of water stations in parking lots. These are pay-by-the-gallon machines that offer drinking water. They’re not ideal for filling large tanks, but they’re great for small jugs of a few gallons or less in a pinch.

Established campgrounds, of course, will typically have water hookups. You’ll also occasionally find water at rest stops, and a host of small businesses that value the patronage of those travelling through.

Like everything else, be courteous and respectful, and patronize the business the water hookup is at whenever you can. Also note that not every water spigot you come across will be potable water that’s safe to drink - it’s always safer to ask if you’re unsure.

You don’t need the stuff you think you need

I did this and I bet you will too - you’re going to pack your new rig with a ton of stuff you think you need, and you’re going to fill every nook and cranny with it, even the “kind of a pain to get at” storage spaces. And then you’re going to go on your first trip, and half of that stuff you’re never even going to look at once. Even now, after just moving into our bus, I’ve already made a note of stuff we haven’t even looked at since moving in.

The truth is, when you live in a house or an apartment, it’s easy to accumulate a ton of things, far more than you ever really need. When you live in a vehicle, you’re quickly forced to evaluate the importance of each item with you every time you want to bring in something new. Each individual item becomes a whole lot more important - and I guaranteed there’s a lot less of that really important stuff than you think.

You’re going to become a DIY handyman

If you’re in a self-built rig like we have always been, this is one true inevitability. If you end up with a leak in the plumbing system you designed, you are probably the most qualified person around to fix it. Nobody will know your systems and their weird quirks better than you. Plus, any established RV service center simply won’t be able to help, so you won’t have much of a choice. But this, in my opinion, is a good thing. You don’t have to wait around for help with little repairs, and they’ll be easier on your pocketbook too.

In my time on the road I’ve made repairs nearly every major system we’ve ever had - I’ve fixed broken furniture, I’ve replaced solar charge controllers, I’ve repaired electrical connections, I’ve fixed (so very many) leaking plumbing lines. It’s par for the course on the road, but it gets easier and easier with every fix.

Everything takes a little more planning

Now, some people live this lifestyle absolutely flying by the seat of their pants and loving every unpredictable minute. But I think for the majority of full-time travelers, the truth is that even things as simple as everyday errands require quite a bit more logistical planning than they do if you live in a house. Everything from grocery shopping to getting fuel to finding a restaurant to grab lunch at requires pre-planning, otherwise you spend hours moving a large vehicle around a city, which is never fun and wastes a ton of time. Plus, everyday tasks like getting mail or getting a prescription filled involve several more steps than they normally would.

For an example, when we plan to move camp spots, we try to fit all of our errands into one day to minimize the amount of time we have to spend in the city. We do a grocery pickup in the morning, stop at an Amazon locker in the afternoon, find a gas station in the area that has diesel and a big enough parking lot for us, maybe head to a dog park to give Piper some exercise, and of course find a dump station to empty our cassette toilet and hopefully refill our water tank as well. To get this all done in a few hours sometimes requires several days of scouting parking lots and plazas and pre-ordering stuff online. It’s a lot, and it often feels like a full day’s work when you’re done. But as far as unusual things about nomadic living, it’s definitely one of the easier things to get accustomed to.

In Shuttle Bus Life, size matters

This is one of the biggest differences we’ve experienced between living in our shuttle bus and living in our van. Our van was 20 feet long, and our bus is 25 - and that 5 feet makes a big difference when we’re in town. We can’t really fit in a standard parking space like we used to, unless we back into a spot and hang way over the curb, so we end up looking for pull throughs and big, spacious parking lots any time we have errands to run. In fact I try to avoid any parking lots that don’t at least have a few pull through spots altogether - parking large vehicles in tight spaces can be stressful for everyone involved. We also have to be far more careful with any steep driveways, as our clearance in the back is much lower than it was in our old van.

It of course makes a big difference while we’re camping, too - we’re way more comfortable than we used to be in our living space. For that reason alone I wouldn’t probably ever want to go back to a smaller rig, but plenty would disagree with me. It’s no doubt a balancing act between these two things every time you decide on a vehicle.

Rent becomes gas & mechanic fees

One of the biggest benefits to living in a vehicle is the affordability of it all. If you’re set up like we are for a lot of off-grid camping and very little need for established facilities, you can keep costs extremely low for the vast majority of the time.

But unless you’re staying in the state you’re from (and where’s the fun in that?!), or you’re a travelling mechanic yourself, you’re going to have some large recurring expenses. Fuel is of course the most predictable one - it’s no surprise that either gas or diesel becomes a near-weekly expense, and you’ll be filling up far more often than that if you’re doing long drives.

Mechanic expenses are less predictable, but an absolute inevitability. I’d seriously recommend a small emergency repair fund stashed away somewhere before you embark on your adventures. We had an unexpected brake repair that ran us $1400 once, and that’s far from the most expensive emergency repair there is. When it’s your house they have in their garage, you’re at the mercy of the mechanic and there’s nothing you can do other than pay the bill. Plan for it, trust me.

You can get used to anything - almost

Let me explain: in our first van, we started with a seven gallon water tank. We didn’t drink from this tank as the plumbing wasn’t rated for potable water, so we carried several gallon jugs of water underneath our sink to use for drinking and cooking. We lived this way for two full years. Once we got settled into a routine with this system, it became the most normal thing in the world, no matter how unorthodox it looks from the outside looking in.

Of course we eventually updated this system to something better, and now with up to 100 potable gallons of water on board at any given time our old system seems almost nightmarish. But that’s the point - if you enjoy the lifestyle and you’re willing to make the less-than-ideal aspects of it work for you, eventually you can (and will) get used to almost any kind of strange system or unusual quirk of your rig that becomes part of daily life.

But that doesn’t apply to every single thing for every single person. One thing I could never get used to? Showering at the gym. With our original seven gallon water tank, showers were of course out of the question, so we paid for a national gym membership and would shower there. I absolutely hate the gym - I hate workout machines, I hate sweaty gym clothes, I hate exercising in front of strangers, I hated paying for something I hated, the list goes on - and even after two years of traveling that way, this one particular thing never got any easier for me. Cancelling my gym membership was one of my favorite days of the past two years.

Relationships will be tested

For those of you traveling as a couple, know that this lifestyle can put your relationship through the wringer. When you spend almost one hundred percent of your time in extremely close proximity to your partner, any communication issues or underlying disagreements will be magnified, and quickly. We always joke that we’re “more married than most married people” because this lifestyle throws all kinds of difficult challenges at a relationship, and not everyone is cut out for this kind of living at the end of the day.

That said, there’s not a lot that’s more rewarding that fulfilling a dream with your significant other at your side. The moment that Greg and I pulled our finished bus into our first camp spot in Arizona, quite literally arriving at a moment we had been dreaming about and working towards for almost a year prior, was quite literally magic. For as many hard days as there have been (and will no doubt continue to be), the good days always outweigh them by a huge amount.

Throw all your expectations out the window

This is the most important one - and it applies to buslife, vanlife, and literally any kind of nomadic living. If you’re new to this, the lifestyle is almost certainly nothing like the picture you have in your head. Read that again. No matter how much research you do, how many lifestyle accounts you follow, how many YouTube videos you watch, how many articles you read (this one included!), nothing can adequately prepare you for what it’s truly like to live on the road except living on the road.

Now - don’t take that as a negative, because it most definitely is not. In my experience, I’ve found the places to be more beautiful, the food tastier, and the people friendlier than expected in almost every place we’ve been. Plus, even if it it’s nothing like I imagined it would be at the start (which is true), I wouldn’t still be here over four years later telling you all about it if I didn’t absolutely love what it actually is.

I’ve also found that there is absolutely no one right way to do all of this. You can choose to make this lifestyle whatever you want it to be, and you shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells you there’s a right and a wrong way to go about it. It’s absolute freedom that lets you do, quite literally, whatever you want - and that’s maybe the best part of all.