Hippie bus love
Old school buses are big and cheep. They allow you to create your own world, because unlike RVs they need to be remade. They are strong, cheep, well made, and have high clearance. Buses are the very model of America’s ideals: land of the free, home of the brave. Even though it is the young people of this country which are expressing this heroic ideal because it is not easy. You have to have a tough skin to buffer negative attitudes. Bus living can be challenging but when you lower your needs, you gain some freedom from comfort expectations. You can feel appreciative with less. A good lesson for America today.
The hippy bus movement is still on the roll. Taking cheap living a step farther by expressing art and love on the road.
Bus living means you can always be home, you can travel to where there is work or fun, don’t have to pay rent, and you can have the best real estate. Park your bus at the beach, at the river, or a hip town. Just have to play it cool, know where to park, and close the thick curtains to keep a low profile. It’s a type of freedom. And if you can paint something interesting on the sides you can spread your own message.
People grind away at crappy jobs to pay their rent. Much of humanity’s mind is numbed by working in big box stores, eating cheep processed food, and stuck in rent and bills servitude. Americans specifically suffer from lack of art, nature, or beauty. There is just stuff to buy in boxy architecture, lawns and square bushes. This world has been shaped by hundreds of years of square thinking. Time to put some swing into things. There are other ways of living, you just have to get creative. How creative? Well, that is up to you.
The hip are jumping ship. You got one life to live, baby, and those who know- go.
Low rent situations make time. Time means you can think, relate, and create. So much more fulfilling to the human soul. Find your own way to be.
If you can move around, you can find your people. The people of the rainbow attract each other. Find people who inspire you and support your worldview. The more you spend time with open-minded people the more supported you feel to be yourself and think your own thoughts.
This is a bus thats got heart.
This is our this is our 1990 Isuzu turbo diesel. It's 4 cylinder so it gets gas like a SUV. We bought it last year and paid 5,500 for the truck. We were working a horrible job being managers for five mobile home parks in Redding. It was very difficult. So, we decided that we didn’t want to live that way anymore - paying the bills and living the hard life. So, we started collecting supplies - 13 solar panels, three batteries, a refrigerator, an air conditioner, a TV - the whole works. We built it ourselves at home in the backyard. We did it totally off-grid. We didn't use regular power to build it. We did it all with the sun.
We have our two teenage kids in the back that travel with us. We home-school them on the road. They love it. This thing sleeps 4. There are two dogs back there too. We didn't blueprint it, we didn't draw it out, we just built it. It's got an 8-foot by 1-foot skylight down the middle of the house that you can pop open. It feels like you're standing outside. It’s fully insulated, fully electrical, you can walk in and flip on a light like a house, there's a sink back there, and the solar shower. Pretty much all the amenities that you'd ever need.
It's a wonderful life. You can follow us on a blog called Mayor Family Travels.
Tough and in touch
My name is Sierra Rose this bus is called Lola. I've had Lola since 2010. So that's thirteen years now. I haven't really traveled around a whole lot. She spent a lot of time parked. There's always been a dream to have her as a kind of rolling art gallery to take to shows.
I have the back open so it's easier to throw drum sets and amps and stuff in and out. But lately. I haven't been playing music. I've actually been using this thing for a plumbing van. I’m doing plumbing work locally and that's what I did all week - plumbing up in Trinidad. But I'm always holding onto that dream though - of making it into an art fair and maybe doing some traveling. I've done all the work and I've rebuilt the motor partially. I did all the work to it myself. This here bus is a pain in the *** but I keep it running. I keep Lola on the road and my dream alive.
The original anti-nuclear action bus
This cool bus has been used for real good. Bought from the forest service, it was used to transport protesters to anti-nuclear protests for many years. Now it is retired, but it still to travels to the Oregon Country Fair.
Caught sight of this beautiful work of art and hand to snap a picture. The car was parked next to it. I imagine it’s the same creative hand.
This bus says Circus Underwater Freakshow. And the nice woman who lives in it explains her art bus.
“I'm Prankster Little Sis and this is the prankster bus. I got it on Ken Kesey’s birthday and my partner, Turtle, had the idea to let everybody paint it at the Skull and Rose’s music festival in Ventura. So, everyone was really into painting it up. The original Pranksters, Mary Bankston and George Walker, painted it and Caroline Garcia and Sunshine both painted on it too. Now the bus is open to let everyone express themselves.”
The Bus Further
IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SHE IS REFERRING TO, HERE IS A BIT OF HISTORY FROM WIKIPEDIA
The Merry Pranksters were comrades and followers of American author Ken Kesey.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur, organizing parties, creating scenes as socio-political actions, and giving out LSD. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the 1960s cultural movement commonly thought of as hippies with odd behavior, tie-dyed clothing, and renunciation of normal society, which they ironically dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and documents a notorious 1966 trip on Furthur from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey's friend the novelist Larry McMurtry. Kesey was in flight from a drug charge at the time.
This is a green machine. I bet the Incredible Hulk lives here.
Flames on the bottom and moss on the top. Must be really fast but when it’s parked it doesn’t move for months.
This bus is called Sun Shine
Here is another traveling art-home - the Third Eye Rambler. This more-than-a-bus has great art dynamics with the hazy watercolor background with geometric foreground. Transitioning through the color palette this artistic expression is a flowing rainbow on the road.
The Third-Eye-Rambler has a back up vehicle called the Peanut Butter Shark. Probably acting as a on-the-go garage.
Hey Now Bus
This bus is running on rainbows.
If your not a painter just go for funky.
Whatever…
RV’s work too.
If you cant afford a school bus just go for something lighter. You can still make it hip.
A true hippy takes an RV and turns it into a yellow submarine.
This radical art piece on wheels is a roaming art center and tattoo parlor. Run out of his tattoo parlor by gentrification, artist Damion decided to create a art studio on wheels. Starting with the door, Damion illustrates his love of gears and sacred geometry. It is the working of the universe. Every square inch of the interior is pimped out in three dimensional collage. Found objects are transformed into a spiritual alter, a transformation of trash into the mystical. Damion’s art bus is a powerful roaming alter, reminding us of deep structures within our lives: time, machinery, death, nature and the human spirit. Roam on Damion!
This is a chalk board van so the art can be remade after it rains.
The Mother Ship