We are Tessa and Dillon, and TheBusandUs is the way we share our story with all of you! Our story is not short, but this is our attempt at giving you a quick synopsis. Tessa and I met in 2013 and quickly made budding plans to travel extensively. We didn't know how and we didn't know what this meant for our careers, but eventually our love for road tripping expanded into an idea to drive to the bottom tip of South America in our dream vehicle, the VW Bus.

We bought the bus in late 2014, ol Rita as she is known was the only bus for sale in Alaska at the time. It was our dream vehicle, it was our escape vehicle, it was everything we thought; except it did not run or move on its own. In fact we bought the bus for $500 with this trip in mind, in order to make the 2015 world cup. How naive we were. We even bought the pictured vanagon at one point considering we were way in over our heads with the rebuild, but pressed on with the bus. I am not going to bore you with the juicy one year rebuild details but we have a restoration blog post you can check out.

http://www.thebusandus.com/blog/restoration1

About a year later, 7 months after the expected departure date we were ready to go. We had quit our jobs a few months earlier, Tessa being a special education teach and I was working in an office working in supply chain management. The open road beckoned but we had no idea what it had in store. Finishing in February and hitting the road was a bit of a challenge as we didn't have a chance to go camping in the bus in the middle of winter in Alaska. We had serious lessons to learn and a few breakdowns to experience while in Canada and the contiguous 48 states. We would never recommend leaving home without spending some serious time in your adventure mobile before hitting the road, but we were antsy to leave. 

We spent the next few months surfing the coast and chasing the snow in the Rockies before meeting with our friends Ben and Roberto and carpooling into Baja. Our intro to Latin America was sweet as we felt safe in numbers but eventually we took off on our own and explored to our hearts content. We drove nearly 50,000 miles to the bottom tip of South America (Tierra Del Fuego) and crossed country borders 21 times before shipping the bus from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Jacksonville Florida. We then tracked up the East coast, cut over towards Banff and are now further exploring the west coast of the United States.

We haven't done a great job updating the blog, but our Instagram has told quite a tale if you would like to scroll through old posts. Eventually we will publish our entire story, but for the moment we are to busy enjoying the freedom the road offers.