Meet Ed

This is Ed.

Hey -- it'll make both your day and mine if you donate to Water Life Hope. 

This is Ed, formerly a school bus.  After going through the complete outfitting process for a loaded bike tour -- a bicycle trip where you carry everything on your bike -- it became clear that Ed would be part of the trip.  So we have how embarked on an outfitting process for Ed.  We have 30 days.  Tick tock. 

 Ed aspires to be a fairly comfy rolling metal tent for the trip, with a few accoutrements.  Having Ed should facilitate dispersed camping,  and other varieties of free camping.  The ability to keep the bikes inside the bus solves all kinds of weather and security issues.  While a support vehicle wasn't part of the original plan, there really are some advantages.

We are trying to have most of it done by the time Steve, Matt and I go to the Middle Georgia Epic on February 16, planned as a dry run for Ed.  Don't be impressed.  We're not gravel racers, but our pal Nicole is.  We're doing the wimpy 22-mile fun ride and she'll race a decidedly non-wimpy 150 miles.  Our focus will be on making Ed ship shape while Nicole amazes all and sundry in the race.

So what needs to be done?  Plenty.  We have stripped out most of the seats.  It went from a 20 passenger vehicle to a 5 passenger vehicle.  The remaining seats are comfortable enough for a 15-minute jaunt across town but have limited charms beyond that.  We're chasing Ford Transit bench seats on craigslist and ebay, and keep coming up dry.  How do we know we want seats from Ford Transit vans?  Matt had spotted them on van conversion sites -- there appear to be a goodly number of people who want a cheap alternative RV.  And Steve and I went to a Ford dealership to try them out, mystifying the salesperson.  I don't believe she'd ever had prospective customers who only wanted to sit in the back seat.

Solar panels and 12-volt LED lights are in our front hallway and living room, waiting for the time when they'll be charging devices and lighting the dark away from developed campgrounds.  They have to be installed.   We need to build sleeping platforms, and bolt on yards of l-track to support both storage hammocks and a sleeping hammock for Matt when he comes.  After much deliberation, checking reviews and videos, we picked a portable toilet.  There are probably jokes to be made about portable toilet videos, but they'll have to be made somewhere else.  We have to figure out where the potty will go in the van, and how to curtain it off.

All of this has to happen in a remarkably small space.  A bus without the seats sounds commodious until you consider that we're planning to bring the bikes inside when we're not riding them.  And boy do they eat space.  Carol and Steve decided to go for Trek Powerfly electric mountain bikes.  They're enormous.  The wheelbase is so long you can't put one on a standard bike rack.  We finally sprung for an adequately-sized rack at a liquidation sale.  It still wasn't cheap.  And these bikes weigh over 50 pounds each.  So there are two of these enormous e-bikes that require motorcycle ramps to get into the bus, my (non-electric, less than 20 pound) touring bike and whatever Matt's riding when he's there.  Then we need someplace to sleep and everybody has to be able to get to the potty.  Thank goodness nobody has screaming desires for a cute little galley kitchen.  Not happening.

Then there are the things that would be nice, but we'll roll with or without.  We're hoping to put in window screens.  A solar shower outside the bus would be great.  And painting it would be awfully nice, especially since it's illegal in some places to have a big yellow bus when it isn't a school bus.  If stopped, we'd just have to do our best to look elderly and non-threatening.

We'll make some progress on the bus this weekend.  Stay tuned.