Van life in the short bus! Tour a school bus conversion. OMG the GAS!!!

Would you like to see Christine and Daniel's van or school bus, I should say, on this episode of How Not to Van Life? Hi, my name is Christine. This is my school bus. That's right, I ride a school bus. It's a 1990 Chevy P30, which is also a step van, which is very key for insurance and registration purposes. It's got about 200,000 miles on it now that we've taken it down to Honduras and back up. Wow, that's a long drive. It was totally worth it, but it was also just a nightmare in gas mileage because... What does it get? She gets about six to eight miles a gallon. So you measure feet per gallon on this. Yeah, pretty much anytime you go a mile, you're like, well, that was a dollar. It's all good, though, because you get to bring your whole house with you. So come check it out. All right. It's a bit messy, of course. What van life isn't actually messy? And if they say, oh, this is so clean, they're ******* lying. All right. All right. So this is it. Here we are. So welcome. You are in the kitchen slash dining room. OK, so how's your kitchen set up? We've got a sink that has a water pump and water heater. OK, where's the water go? The water goes out. OK, gotcha. That's fine. I'm not judging. No, it's just straight water just yet. A 40 gallon freshwater tank. Yeah. Is this propane? Propane that's mounted underneath the bus. OK. And then we've got the four burner stove, an oven. We store most of our cookware in there. I've had cookies baked out of this oven and another desert some on another trip. Yeah. Yeah. They're pretty good. We like to do that while we're driving as well. And it's one of the luxuries of having a big enough space of having an oven, something that I really wanted, along with an actual freezer. Oh, wow. You have a really pizza coming hanging out tonight with you guys. Yeah. Hell yeah. So that was really nice in Mexico when it was really hot. We get to have some ice cream out on the road. Wow. And that runs off of propane as well. No, actually. So this along with our LED lights and anything else that we need to charge, like this TV, even that speaker, it's all off of solar. We've got 500 watts of solar on the roof, along with a deck that fills the right the remaining of the deck. Is the railing on the deck come down when you're driving? Yes. So we can have it so that we just have like a little lip on the side that helps us when we are hauling a bunch of other people's gear along with us, because we usually travel with many people. And then the rest of the time, we'll just like pull out individual slots and we'll put it up. So one of those things, because we like to be able to like kind of move everything out and like transform the bus if we want to. Just like this top shelving here, generally it's only from here back. And then the rest of the time we can just remove each one of these and just store them on the other side of the bed. And then we can add additional storage. And then also the bed can fold up into like a couch and make it into a futon. And then we've got like a little surrounding area for our TV that Daniel just had to have. Yeah. Do you have a satellite to go with it? I wish. No, but we do have really good cell service and hotspots that we do. And apparently you can watch movies off of your cell service in Mexico and Canada. Whoa. And the United States. So that's generally where we're going to be traveling. Is this one way up and down? Yes, it is. We make it really difficult for our guests to get up there because if it's like, if you can't get up there that well. You don't deserve to be up there. Because you might fall off. There's not always railings on it and those are kind of a new addition. So we kind of make it a little bit more challenging for friends and everyone to come up there. Fair enough. Yeah. And you said you had a hard time registering this. Yes. Because what happens with a school bus when you're trying to register and insure it? So with a school bus, a lot of times they don't want you to actually be able to register it. And they want you to go through like getting it professionally done by an RV and then actually going through and making it a full conversion. And so it's really difficult, at least in the state of California to register and more importantly, insure it. So the registration, we were able to, luckily we had someone who's really, really chill and we've gone to the DMV so many times that we are now experts at going to the DMV and sweet talking our way through it. So we were able to get someone to come in here and their requirement was that we have a defined sleeping space, kitchen space, and toilet area. This open up? This opens up. It also goes and all the way down to the wall. Eventually we're going to make it so that we can take one of the backs off of these seats that were actually original to the bus and be able to fit it in between so that we have an extra sleeping space. Oh, nice. But right now for sleeping extra people, we have this eye bolt up here above some storage. And then we've also got an eyeball back there and we use those hookups for slack lining, rodeo lining, hammocks. And while we were in Mexico, we had a double decker hammock set up so we could accommodate our guests. Wow. It worked out really nicely. Yeah. And then we took out like the extra insulation in there and just made it into food storage. Oh yeah, that's pretty good storage. It goes all the way back? It goes all the way back on either side. Okay. And then Daniel did this cool little thing. He's like kind of a nerd when it comes to lighting. So we have under under lit for all of our food area, but you probably can't see it because it's already so bright in here, but it's also goes all the way up to the front and it's kind of in here as well. It's this orange light. That's nice. Makes it really easy for us to find stuff in the dark and not have to look around for a remote because our led lighting is all remote. Gotcha. But it's also not super bright to blind you. No, it's not. I'm not a personal fan of the led lighting, so I put up these little fairy lights, but they don't do enough for lighting necessarily. I put in really bright lights in my van and it like I avoid turning them on. Yeah, it's miserable. We do also have this like recess track lighting, which I need for cooking because Lord knows Daniel doesn't do any of that. Yeah. And then lots of storage under the bed, which we pretty much don't even use most of the time. And then we also put on a back rack so we can potentially hopefully get motorcycles so we don't have to spend so much gas money once you're once you're where you want to be. Yeah, exactly. So we do have these electric bikes that we will use as well. Okay. And then also, you know, all of our friends out in the desert want to store their stuff in our vehicle. So it's there as well. So how do you earn getting up to the top? Is it through the inside? Yeah. Oh, you can. If you do it through the outside, then you just have to be really careful. We have one of our friends already break one of our lights off because he thought he could do it properly. But if you want to do it from the outside, you basically have to be a really good climber and just you really do have to earn it. Geez. Yeah, you really do. What's funny is the ambulance parked next to you is how I got up there the other night. Yeah. Which we'll have in another video is that ambulance and how and how Ethan got up there. Yeah. If you want to go up, there's a couple ways to go up. Yeah. Show us. Don't get caught on the heating. Look at that outfit. You can use this and then pull and then use that. And then you got to do the tricep dip from there. So I'll see you up there. Okay. You got to hold the camera now and I got to impress everybody. Okay. See if he makes it. Oh, that's a good beta. It's a good beta, eh? Eh. I earned it. You made it. I made it. It's like you climb or something. Yeah, I used to, but it's oh, shit. Now we got to jump down. Or you can use the... The ambulance will save us. Yeah. Oh, it's sketchy being up here with all the ice. Yeah. Yeah. This morning we had a pretty rough time because I'm from California and never experienced the ice. It's like up here with a broom trying to get it off the solar panels. Didn't really work. Well, we didn't even have sun yesterday. It's nice. At least today we have sun. I'm surprised this thing is still up here, honestly. By the way, we are at the GGBY festival. It's a Highline festival. Gobble, gobble, bitches, yeah. If you want to come, it's at the Thanksgiving week each year and it's at ggbygathering.org. So if you want to come check it out and see all these vans and Highlines and other cool shit, including our space that we built, check it out and go get some tickets. Do it. Do it. We're here. We're here. We're having fun. We get dressed up or try to... Hell yeah. We're posting gobble, gobble names later, which is why I'm dressed like so. Yeah. And check out our other van videos. We're doing a whole van series. This is an ambulance that we'll end up showing next and a pretty cool bed set up they have for parties. But it doesn't usually snow here and that's why we're all kind of a little bit colder than usual. But let's take the emergency exit back into the van. Oh, don't throw a snowball at me. Oh no. Merciless. You ready for the beta down? Yeah. Yeah. Show me how this works. That is actually pretty good. Should I, should I try that? Yeah. Should I try it with a camera? Look at that. Let's do it. Okay. I got to earn it. Let's see if I can keep my hat on. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah, it works. It works. That is a good beta. Wow. I was questioning it for a bit. This episode is sponsored by BaseJumpMOAB.com. If you want to jump off a cliff and live, hit up Andy Lewis, Andy Lewis, because he has a tandem base company now and you can experience base jumping for the first time if you've never done it. Holy crap. And I got to jump the other day and it was super fun and I didn't feel like I was going to die. It's super safe enough considering it's base jumping. So go to BaseJumpMOAB.com and get your tandem with him. Why shouldn't we van life? Because it becomes a mess like this every single day. And you may have gas mileage that is really, really horrendous, but you should do it for all the perks of having this while everyone's freezing their ass off in a tent. Yeah, that's true. Therefore you shouldn't tent life. Hey, thanks for watching, but don't be an idiot and try highlining without going with somebody who knows what they're doing the first time you go out. We actually have available now the Highline University International, which is A to Z, everything you need to know before you go highlining. This teaches you how to use a highline that's already rigged. So let's talk about some leash management. That's the H0 course, which is out right now and available at HowNotToHighline.com. It's over a hundred videos with quizzes, PDFs, illustrations, and it comes with homework and teachers that you submit it to. It's a very interactive online school. So you get to learn in person online.