Well, as I recapped in my last post in this subject, the city towed my bus in December after the neighbors complained too many times about it being parked on the street for so long. A lot has happened in the intervening weeks, but also really nothing has changed.

The big thing that’s happened is that my girlfriend bought a condo! We moved into it over the month of January, and it’s really been reinforcing how much stuff I’ve been holding onto in the hopes of continuing the skoolie project. Kitchen appliances, electrical components, pieces of furniture, all the tools I bought. A lot of other materials were being stored in the bus like the hardwood flooring and cedar shingles, the filing cabinet and secretary desk I’d recently installed, and some kitchen cabinets I’d picked up just a couple weeks before it got towed, so those are already gone. Okay.

During the move, I kept an eye on the auctions waiting for the bus to come up for bidding. I wasn’t sure how much it might go for or when it would go up, and I didn’t have a lot of money coming in, but I was still optimistic for a while. As of today I still haven’t seen it go up for auction, and at this point I’m giving up on it. Buying it back directly is a non-starter — when it was first towed the price to retrieve it was nearly $1000 and at my last check it was just over $3500 as the storage fees went up by $50 a day.

The fact of the matter is, I simply don’t have the resources to continue pursuing this goal right now. I’m still not steadily employed with a reliable income, I’m still working through these depression and anxiety issues that keep my motivation at nearly nonexistent levels.

And there’s still the matter of where I would even keep the bus if I did win it back from the towing company. To store it safely, I need to get it into an RV Storage facility, and I don’t have the money to pay the monthly fee for that. To get it into a facility it needs to be insured; to get it insured it needs to be registered in the state; to get it registered I need to get it back from the tow company. I don’t have the money for any one of these multiple steps, let alone all of them. And if I don’t do all of these things, I’m left with having to park the bus on the street again, which only leaves me vulnerable to another tow.

So, I’m letting it go. I need to figure out still what this means for the rest of my immediate future goals. My living situation is stable for now – I’m providing child care here at home for my nephew while my girlfriend is paying the bills and the mortgage on her new place. But that’s not a permanent situation.

I’ve already given up and thrown out a number of the items I’d held onto for the bus – the water barrels, the solar panels. I’ll be donating the rest of the appliances and furniture I’d held onto to the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore in the next week or two.

I haven’t given up on the idea of a skoolie at some point in the future, though I’ll probably try a stint of more stealthy ‘van-lifing’ before I try a bus again. I’ve actually seen some good candidate vehicles come up in the tow company auctions. But I’ve definitely realized that I was using the bus project as a way to kind of put off addressing a lot of other instabilities I’ve got going on right now, and that if I put more energy into resolving those issues now, I might end up in a better position to try to reboot the skoolie project again in a few years.

So instead I’ll be using this time to settle into the new place, and refocus my energies on my freelance business. Thinking about starting a newsletter, or at least putting more effort into my Patreon. We’ll see. I’m going to work on these plans for the next few days and will post an update about them here.