I haven’t been to Starbucks since sometime last spring, so finding one with a big parking lot today was a treat. Karma stayed there while I took an Uber to a fantastic massage therapist five miles down the road who had only a tiny parking area. She worked on me for 90 minutes. My body is so happy it’s going back again next week.

A couple of people now have asked me how I learned to drive the bus. Here is the story. 

When I first hooked up with the carpenter who would build my dream, the plan was to start with a short bus and travel while I was still working, and then move up to a larger bus if I found I liked the lifestyle. His friend let me drive his short skoolie and it was easy. As the plans I make are forced to change, the short bus and the long bus because one medium-sized bus about twice the length of that short bus.  

It was all blind faith with no backup plan. The woman from whom I purchased the bus assured me I’d have no problems. (I remember her having to talk me off the ledge a few times, though.) You need a CDL to drive a bus, but you can drive any RV with a regular license. Thus, I never got behind the wheel until the bus was finished on the inside. It cost me thousands and thousands of dollars to have it shipped from North Carolina to Connecticut then up to New Hampshire, and it cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars to have it driven out to the carpenter’s workspace and years later downstate in NH to get reclassified. (I’ve not yet wanted to calculate the total cost of the project.) 

When I got the temporary plate, a neighbor took me out for a short drive as I watched over his shoulder, then tried to drive back. He made me nervous and I did the same to him. A more formal lesson came from the truck driver I hired to drive the bus 150 miles round trip for the to have someone stamp a form that said the bus was no longer a commercial vehicle. (It had to not be yellow and not have any of the lights that used to flash. It had to have a bed, kitchen and bathroom facilities and its own source of heat.) 

The lesson lasted almost an hour. The main things I learned were that I was big and people would try to stay out of my way, to pay attention to nothing (scenery, other vehicles, the sound of items falling behind me, etc.) but my ability to control the bus, how to line it up so I was in my lane, and to be polite and pull over whenever possible to let people pass. This was all done on fairly easy stretches of road. 

The day I soloed, I told the bus, “You’ve got 93,000 miles under your hood and I’ve got maybe six at most, so please be nice.” I also called on my guides, guardians and ancestors for help. The first two times, I drove the bus from the shop to a boarded up rest stop about a mile down the road and then back to the garage where I would turn around and go back to the rest stop and back to the shop, and repeat and repeat, never taking my eye off the white line on the side of the road. It was a beautiful road: recently paved, flat terrain and shoulders wide enough to pull over. At first I may have hit a top speed of 25 miles per hour, then 30, then 35. Karma – the name she later chose to be called – has a governor and every mechanic I spoke with advised me not to mess with it and accept the fact 45 was top speed and therefore I would not be able to travel on major highways. That sounded fine, though, because I wasn’t even hitting 40, I was retired and didn’t have to hurry, and I wanted to see the countryside and not six lanes of pavement punctuated with exit signs. 

As I got a little braver I went another mile down the road and turned around in an abandoned gas station. When I had a feel for the wheel, I began taking other roads. I scared myself quite a few times, like when logging trucks came around corners into my lane, when there was no shoulder on the side of the road, and the time I couldn’t turn around and had to drive four miles down a narrow, old, potholed road with steeper climbs than I had taken before, and sharp curves that had no warning signs. I could only handle driving about an hour at a time. 

When I was confident I could control the bus, I ventured out on three multi-day journeys, each longer than the last. As the miles added up, I found myself lessening my death grip on the wheel and feeling comfortable going 40. My first big bridge, my first wicked steep hill, my first rain, my first nighttime, my first Walmart. Each one was worthy of its own Girl Scout badge, or at the very least, the gold stars my first-grade teacher stuck on perfect papers. Now I find myself going 45 on many roads for long stretches, and I’m able to look at the whole road and not just the white line on the side. I have learned to let go of the wheel long enough to hit the switch on my left to turn on my wipers without having to look. Each has its own switch. Each has two setting: fast and slow. Tonight was my second driving in the rain. 

With practice, I’ll get better at backing up and using my mirrors (two on each side). I’ll also get better at reading the fine print before I ask to stay somewhere. It was too late when I learned the host required visitors pull into the start of circle driveway in front of the house, then back out and up a hill to the top of the driveway and park between two expensive rigs.