Introduction

It is 3:00 a.m. Friday, October 4...and I grudgingly still like this bus.  Wife is asleep, campground is asleep.  The phone modem struggles valiantly to connect to the internet, seven miles north of the middle of nowhere, occasionally hitting dial-up-like speed despite indicating “no signal".

Woke up early because I passed out at 8:30 last night after a warm shower, after reassembling and aligning the bay door latch assembly, after finally accessing the water heater controls and starting the water heater, after breaking into the stuck-shut water heater bay by disassembling the bay door latch assembly, after hooking up sewage hoses and shore power, after running around kicking up the campground gravel wherever the end-of-life steering-assist ram had slung fluid when I turned the wheel to the stops while trying to squeeze into the campsite, after the generator died again, after threading the bus between rocky outcrops on the river road, after finally getting the generator and AC working in a WalMart parking lot, after crossing the mountains and desert with no AC in 107 degree heat, after the generator died exactly one block after pulling out of the seller’s driveway. 

In other words, we just bought a bus!  PD4106-112 (Parlor coach, Diesel-powered, GM model line 4106, the 112th one made.)  This is the eagle-themed (eagle the bird, not Eagle the other bus brand,) coach you probably saw on the internet over the last year or two.  Paint job is not to everyone’s taste, though it is rich and lustrous, and those who like it, like it intensely.  Their wide-eyed wonder and excitement encourage us to keep at it – if they think we’re lucky to own an unique and amazing motorhome, maybe we should think so, too.  Even the couple that just bought the campground - that I had now fouled with random thirty-five foot streaks of power-steering fluid - looked on lovingly and gushed about the bus.

For all its issues and challenges, we like the bus a lot.  Bright spacious interior,  huge powerful engine and lives up to our expectations as the right balance of length, width, height,  maneuverability, power, livability, storage and relatively easy to work on.  After crawling all over, under and through every square inch of the coach for two days, we concluded the coach is in astounding shape overall and is 99.44% rust-free - it has far less rust than any other RV we've inspected.  Astounded was my wife’s choice of words after only a cursory look of the body and frame, following two years of saying she would not buy an “old” RV.  Jaws drop in disbelief when we tell admirers that the bus is 52 years old.  It is a unicorn that some say doesn’t exist:  a PD4106 with an 8v92 Turbo Detroit Diesel engine, rebuilt and installed about six years ago, with a v730 Allison automatic transmission. And, for someone who drives only manual-transmission cars to avoid using brake pedals, it has the greatest invention ever:  a real, branded Jake brake! (Jacobs Engineering engine brake)

I’m Steve, my wife is Lone.  We both are nomadic, through circumstance as children, then later by choice.  Experienced travelers, wanderers, or vagabonds – in Spanish we would be Viajeros, which is coincidentally the name of the bus.  This is our story of buying the bus in California and both  painfully and joyfully making our way back to Washington DC.

Viajeros