We Bought a Bus

When we moved back into our home last fall, a few months after I had been diagnosed with breast cancer on the heels of our 7 months of full-time international travel, and after unexpectedly living with my gracious parents for 4 months, Colby always said he didn’t think we’d live in our home for more than a year. I wasn’t convinced though. With cancer in our headlights I couldn’t imagine leaving the “security” of “home.” But oh how we missed our simple, minimalist, travel lives.

Don’t get me wrong, we quickly settled back into the comforts of “home.” We reveled in spending holidays with family, going to church with familiar faces each week and spending time with friends. Heck, we even came to love the grocery store employees around the corner from our home, not to mention the convenience of walking to the grocery store and piano lessons! We treasured letting the kids ride their toys outside, or taking a walk around the neighborhood. Zoe was thriving at school in Chinese immersion. Crew was loving another year of preschool with his cousin. Mom was seizing every opportunity to retreat to the mountains or zen-out at yoga. Marley was sleeping in the same bed in the same bedroom for months at a time! Dad was working the same hours in the same “office” every day. It was all so sweet and comfortable to be “home” again. And yet, there was this little inner voice inside me that seemed to whisper “home is in your heart.”

A few years ago the company Colby was working for closed down all operations unexpectedly. It was a big surprise and yet we both felt a tremendous amount of peace and felt like we had been prepared. A few weeks prior we confided in one another that we felt like “change was coming.” We couldn’t quite put a finger on how we knew it, but we both had felt a tiny whispering about it independent of one another. We didn’t know what it would be, and we had been trying to conceive Marley for a year and a half, so I thought surely it had to be a pregnancy, but when Colby called me one day a few weeks later while I was at a trampoline park with the kids and said,

“So, something crazy just happened.”

“What?” I asked. What he was about to tell me far from my imagination.

“Imzy is shutting down.”

“What does that mean,” I asked, my mind swirling.

“Everybody in the company is out of a job.”

Fortunately, we were blessed with a few months of severance pay and we knew something even better was in the works. Colby began applying to job after job. We’d feel good about things and then things would shift and it would become clear that that path wasn’t meant to be. One of those opportunities was a job with Facebook. He made it through several rounds of interviews and design challenges to then be flown out for an in-person interview. We both had several strong feelings that this was the path and we began to look at apartments and homes in the Bay area. Somewhere in the middle of this process, we went to a Jason Mraz concert and I remember him singing these familiar lyrics to a song we knew and loved;

Just know
You’re never alone
You can always come back home
Home, home
You can always come back

I got chills listening to it and again we felt sure that we were on the cusp of a move to Palo Alto for Colby to work for Facebook, or one of the several other tech companies he had applied to. I started to get emotional just thinking about leaving home. Then on the day of Colby’s in-person interview at the Facebook campus, the recruiter he had been working with got in a car accident and once again it was as if the stars had suddenly realigned as he got handed off to other people and his interview got all mixed up.

We were so confused when an offer didn’t come and we started to question ourselves and the feelings we had interpreted.

Eventually, a job offer from a different local company came and it was a great stepping stone and we were grateful for how things played out, even though once again they were far from how we could have predicted and didn’t involve a move at all.

Ultimately that job led to another job — the one we had been dreaming of for years, with Colby working full-time remote. This job enabled our travels and we will forever be grateful.

The cancer diagnosis part of the story was one of those unforeseen plot-twists we never could have seen coming, and yet time and time again we’ve felt tremendous peace about it all, just like we did when Colby’s company shut down operation unexpectedly. Somehow we’ve known that this chapter of our lives was preparing us for even greater things in our future — putting us directly on the path God intended for us to do His work, whatever and wherever that is.

So a few months ago when I was meditating and I got struck out of no-where with the thought that we should sell our house it seemed a little baffling. It felt more than a little bit crazy. But I told Colby about it and it felt right to us both, even if it didn’t make total logical sense.

Throughout the process, as it’s been especially difficult for me to sell the home we love, even though we had already parted with it once, not realizing we would ever live in it again, I’ve been reminded of these lines from that same Jason Mraz song;

Every road is a slippery slope
There is always a hand that you can hold on to
Looking deeper through the telescope
You can see that your home’s inside of you

The next decision after deciding to sell our home of 6.5 years was where do we go next? We considered lots and lots of possibilities but nothing felt quite right for this next chapter of our lives until Colby half-heartedly suggested that we could get a bus and live life on the road. I had suggested the idea months and months ago while we were traveling full-time and Colby hadn’t been onboard at the time but I guess the idea had been marinating and now he was ready :)

So we started researching and looking at buses seriously. And then we found her; the previous owners had dubbed her Penny because they used pennies to cover the holes from where they removed the seats that once herded noisy school kids. They had begun the process of converting her into a home but changed plans.

She’s a retired Colorado school-bus becoming a home for our family of five.

So, we’re trading our home for a school bus. Are we crazy?