Scanning the bus ads had long ago become a daily affair and it was while I was in Orlando on the way home from one of my bus viewing trips that I spotted a GM PD4106 on Craigslist that seemed to have most of the things that I considered essential and it was listed for $20,000, more in line with the range I had been considering. The downside was that the bus was located a long way from home, in Minnesota, and I could see my wife cringe as I dialed the phone to talk to the seller. As During the conversation I was almost disappointed to hear how good everything about the bus sounded and that it contained most of the features on my list, knowing that it could mean one more trip before I could arrive at a decision. One thing I learned early on was how little you can really tell about a coach from a description and pictures. Only by spending a few hours crawling over, under, and through one, taking a test drive, and asking dozens of questions did I ever feel even close to knowing the condition of a given bus.
A Trip to Minnesota
As important as the features of a given bus conversion are, the evaluation is also about the planning that went into all of its systems and how much trouble the owner went to to do the conversion right. Ultimately the buying decision is about how much work you are willing to put in to make a newly acquired coach into the coach of your dreams. I am no spring chicken and at the time I was working a full time job and running a business too and by the end of the day I had but few hours left and even less energy to work on a bus, so for me, finding one that was complete and ready to go was important. All of the conversations about the Minnesota 4106 had sounded positive and I decided that a trip to see it had to be scheduled. Since this coach was priced to sell I wanted to get up to see it as soon as possible, but when I looked at the difference in air fares between flying during the current week or waiting an extra week, I couldn’t justify the extra cost. Additionally, it would cost more to buy a refundable ticket, so I opted for a non-refundable round-trip ticket. Both of those decisions were risky and in retrospect I would recommend paying extra to get a refundable ticket in case the coach you are flying to see sells before you get there, which mine almost did.
I scheduled the trip to take place over a weekend so that I would not miss any workdays. Had I known then that I would be laid off from my job the following week, I would have allowed more time. As it was, I arrived at the seller’s house at 5:00 PM on a Saturday evening and we had only enough time to look over the major systems and take a ride before it got dark, but not enough time to check out the operational status of every single system and appliance. Everything that I saw looked good and since my flight back home was for early the next morning, I told the owners (Sam and Charlet) that if everything on the bus worked I would buy it for the asking price. They agreed and a contract was made. We checked out the rest of the items the next morning and found that the house batteries needed to be replaced. Sam agreed to pay for new batteries. Everything else worked properly and we spent the afternoon filling all of the storage bays with some of the spare parts he had accumulated through the years.
On Monday morning we went to the bank and hit our first snag. Before I had left North Carolina I had gone to my bank to ask how one goes about getting money when in a remote location and I was assured that I could have a wire transfer initiated by the seller’s bank to get money from my account (my bank does not have a branch in Minnesota). This turned out to be an erroneous piece of information. Had I been given the correct information I could have had a cashiers check cut for the amount I needed and then if the sale was not made I could have re-deposited the money back into my account. Unfortunately, from Minnesota my options were limited. My bank offered to place a hold on the funds and fax a letter to the seller stating that the funds would be held, but the hold would be for only seven days and that was not acceptable to the seller who was afraid that it might take longer for the check to clear. Tempers flared, things were said, and finally someone suggested that my wife, who was still back in North Carolina, might be able to go to the bank and initiate a wire transfer from her account if I could get my bank to agree to transfer the money from my account to hers. Within the hour this all happened and the deal was done; I now owned my first bus.
The Trip Home
We installed the new house batteries, I asked at least a hundred more questions about how things worked, and then it was time to leave. I have to admit that sitting there in the driver’s seat with the engine running and a big trip ahead of me was intimidating. I had put about 10,000 miles on my old motorhome so I knew I would eventually get comfortable with everything but at that moment, not only was I on overload with all of the things that I was trying to remember about my new bus, but I also had to learn to shift the thing and quickly. I thanked Sam and Charlet for all the help and for putting me up over the weekend, and was off. Pulling out of their driveway and missing my first shift did not help much but I finally got it into gear. The first order of business was to fill up the fuel tank. I pulled up to the pump and realized that the one thing I had not learned was how to shut off the engine. I placed a quick embarrassing phone call and figured it out about the same time Sam answered the phone. $350 later, I was on I-90 and on my way back home. Unfortunately, it had been more than 35 years since I had shifted a non-synchromesh transmission and that first day I had a tough time making most of my shifts. I had read an article about shifting and had heard several people’s opinions on the topic, but as I quickly learned, it is more of an art than something to be learned from someone else’s instructions. That evening, as I was sharing my experiences with my wife over the phone, she suggested that I get up early and practice shifting in a parking lot before heading out for the day, which turned out to be a great idea. The people working in the stores around that parking lot must have thought I was nuts as I went round and round shifting through the gears and then stopping just to start over again, but after about a half hour I started to get the hang of it. By the end of that day I could at least up-shift through the gears without any grinding but my down-shifting still needed some work and I knew that with mountains ahead I had to improve.
There was a cold front blowing through and the nighttime temperatures were going to be in the mid-30s, so I bought blankets for the bed even though I knew there were some waiting for me when I got home. The furnace fired up several times during the night and I reminded myself to be sure to get the propane tanks filled the next day. I was happy when there was enough propane left in the tanks to get me through the night. Back on the road the next day, I noticed how more comfortable it was to travel these days. Cell phones, Wi-Fi hotspots, and GPS, all things we did not have on our 6-month trip ten years earlier, certainly made navigation and communication easier. I pulled into a crowded mall parking lot so that I could stop for lunch. The parking lot driveway was crowded with cars, making it impossible to turn as wide as I would have liked. I looked in the rearview mirror as I pulled in and saw that I had cleared the car that was waiting to exit, but not by as much as I would have liked. I still had some things to learn about driving a coach that was 11 feet longer than the one I had previously driven. As I pulled through the parking lot I found that each aisle I passed was very narrow and clogged with traffic. I quickly reached the end and had nowhere to go but around the side of the building. I was quickly running out of space and had very little room to turn around. Toward the end of the parking lot I pulled around one of those racks that holds shopping carts and thinking that I had plenty of clearance I continued the U-turn. I glanced in the mirror and quickly locked up the brakes when I saw that I was about to wipe out the side of the coach on the rack. After I stopped I got out to look at the side of the coach. I could have barely fit a piece of paper between the rack and the side of the coach but they never touched. This was another lesson learned and I doubted that it would be the last one.
I knew that I had to cross the mountains somewhere to get back home. I-40 had been closed for months due to a rockslide and I was not sure that it was open yet. I had gone that way before and knew that there were miles of steep grades. I decided that I would try a different route through West Virginia on I-64/I-77 and hoped that I was not making a mistake by doing so as I was still pretty nervous about down-shifting on upgrades. I had found the first day that 62 MPH felt like about the right speed. I have always had a pretty heavy accelerator foot and it took a while to get used to being passed by everything on the road. In eastern Kentucky the hills got steeper and I was happy to have the power of the 8v71. I was routinely passing trucks on uphill grades and being passed by them going down the other side since I was still not as comfortable taking turns at high speed as most of the truckers were. I figured that my center of gravity was higher and that the airbag suspension allowed more leaning. The hills got steeper and the corners got sharper. Doesn’t anyone in this part of the country know how to bank a turn? I was glad to have a towel in my lap because my palms were sweating like crazy. The first time I had to downshift I missed the shift and before I finally got it into third I was down to about 20 MPH, too slow for third so I had to downshift again. This happened several times before I finally figured out that I was better off not using the clutch when downshifting (as Sam had recommended).
It was starting to get dark and I realized that I needed to turn on my headlights, something I had not done before. I thought I remembered that the second round switch controlled the lights and that the first position was for running lights and the second position was for headlights. So while climbing a really steep hill I switched on the running lights (cool!) and then switched to position two and the engine died (not so cool). I quickly turned the switch back off and the engine restarted but by then I had lost all my momentum and was downshifting, still with no headlights, with no idea how to turn them on, and no place to pull over and figure it out. I took the next exit as suggested by my GPS to stop for the night and seemingly mile after mile went by as it got darker and darker and still there was no place to pull over. I finally found a parking lot and found the correct switch, just in time to stop for the night.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful with no catastrophes. I found a place for the bus in my front yard and made some run-up blocks since the slope was a little more extreme than what the leveling system could handle. A few days later Flora asked me “so, is owning the bus as much fun as it was searching for a bus?” This was a very appropriate question. This whole saga had really reinforced the notion that the fun of life is as much in the journey as in achieving a goal. I had to admit that learning about buses, talking to people all over the country, and ultimately traveling to new places to look at buses had been an adventure unto itself. I also quickly tired of looking at the coach sitting in the yard; I wanted to go somewhere!
Lessons Learned
The following list contains a few of the things I recommend for those looking for their first coach.
- Learn as much as you can about buses and the systems they contain. No matter what your previous experiences, these machines are a whole different animal and between the bus systems/components and the support systems that are installed during a conversion, there is a lot to know.
- Take advantage of on-line resources. There are many different forums and groups available, and the people who contribute there know a lot. You can read and you can ask questions and there is hardly a question you can ask that has not been asked before (and is therefore available in the archives).
- Make and refine both a budget and a list of features you want. Separate out those features that are in your opinion essential from those that would be nice but that you can live without. I found that it is unlikely that you will find a coach with everything on your list unless your budget is unlimited.
- Find or create some kind of tool to keep track of coaches you see and the features they have and the contacts you make with their owners. I found that my memory was quickly overwhelmed and had I not created a spreadsheet that contained a checklist of features I was interested in and which coaches had which of them, I would have quickly lost track.
- Consider videotaping when you are looking at a coach. I regret not doing this when Sam spent hours showing me the features of the coach I bought. On trips when my wife was with me I had her take pictures while I asked questions and afterward we were able to better remember what features a coach had. Again, when you are looking a multiple coaches it is easy to forget which one had what.
- Work with an insurance agent and your bank so that you can easily get a policy and the money you need, while in a remote location. And be sure that the bank has given you the correct information; having the money in your account and being unable to access it is a very frustrating situation for both buyer and seller.
- Be patient. Right now there are a lot of wonderful coaches for sale and the selling prices are a fraction of what was being asked a few years back when the economy was better and fuel was cheaper. I certainly was tempted by several coaches along the way and considered settling for coaches that might not have been as good a fit or for paying more than I wanted, but in the end I held out and was rewarded for my patience.
