Whenever I imagine an adventure road trip, the car is always a Volkswagen bus. I towed my bus from Canada when I was 17 and have been working on it ever since. The bus came with rust holes and a soggy interior, so the first thing this project taught me was welding and metal fabrication. The bottom 6 inches of the body were almost completely rusted out. I purchased body panels and an affordable welder and began cutting my dream car apart.

After welding, I paid for a proper paint job with funds I'd earned by teaching snowboarding on weekends and building cabinets during the summer. In college my budget decreased but the work continued, moving slowly, just like the bus itself. I decided to convert the engine to fuel injection using a kit I read about in a forum, but I had to solder every resistor, diode, and component onto a blank PCB to complete the engine control unit. It was terrifying to finally power up the board. I thought it would fry itself and all the money I'd invested in it, but no, somehow everything was in order! I then bought several hundred feet of wire and began rewiring the bus front to back, a very detailed exercise that is coming to a conclusion now.

Over many years of work, months and months of trouble shooting, and obtaining a college education at the same time, I've restored, improved, and re-engineered a proper adventure road trip car. Now I just have to find the time to take it somewhere.