As I write this John is driving the bus up through California. He sent the picture above with his iPhone because he was very proud - he had to back the bus into this spot with that car there and it was no easy task. Now he is driving white-knuckled down a mountain as he tries not to push the brakes too much.

So the bad part of this story so far is that the bus had a few issues that he discovered upon arriving in Nevada. First, the brakes had seized because someone adjusted the air brakes wrong. So that finally worked and John set out at night when the roads were a bit emptier. It was tough because he has never driven anything so big... it's huge! Then he was chugging along uphill and he didn't have any power and the check engine light came on - and he discovered the odometer didn't work! So who knows how many miles are on it. These are all the kinds of things we wondered would happen, since after all we did buy it sight-unseen on eBay. So he stopped and it was 2am and he was on the side of the road somewhere by Lake Tahoe. That was a real low point.

He managed to limp along to the next town which was South Lake Tahoe, where he found a mechanic and had to wait until this morning for them to look at it. It turns out that at some point someone either pulled the whole engine out and put it back in, or put in a different engine. Whoever did that was a lazy bum because they didn't hook up any of the wires, which was why the gauges didn't work. The check engine light came on because it overheated, and luckily it was because the fan simply wasn't hooked up! It's a brand new part, not connected to anything! Once that was fixed, it ran much better. The low-power problem turned out to be some issue with the throttle not being connected properly, and he now feels like he can actually move when he presses the gas, lol.

So the last I heard he was heading to Sacramento where he would get on a highway north to Oregon, and hopefully all goes well from here on out.