Never a bus when you need one.

How to fund a two year cycling trip... we hope.

Aug 12, 2024

In 2021 we lay in bed on a double decker bus that had been converted into an AirBnB stay in Co. Galway, looking at the ceiling. “Jesus, it’d be fairly handy to turn a bus into a tiny home,” I said to Ellie. She didn’t disagree.

Two weeks later we were the owners of a twenty-one-year-old double decker. Another month after that, we were the owners of two mature and very large buses. “Shur, if you’re working on one you might as well work on two. Economies of scale!” says I, as if I knew what I was talking about. Turns out I was very wrong on all counts.

Evidently, myself and Ellie don’t do things because they’re easy; we do things because we think they’re easy when we start them. A bit of a dose when you’re as stubborn as we are. We manage to not talk each other out of some quite interesting and unexpected things. “G’wan shur” is something of a mantra of ours.

We’d been talking for a very long time about cycling around the world. While kicking around ideas for this trip of a lifetime we’d managed to cross 17 international borders together by bicycle, but we’ve long been hankering for a bigger and longer adventure.

Any time we’ve finished a significant cycling tour there has always been a hunger to just keep going, to not stop. We felt that keenly when we cycled along the Baltic coast, a blissfully flat landscape that was one of the least taxing treks we’ve ever taken. As we reached our destination of Tallinn, we knew that we could cycle from there to St. Petersburg in less than a week, and that the ferry north to Helsinki only took a couple of hours.

At the end of every planned cycle trip, life calls, and we return to all the other things that we love, but in the back of our minds, pulling at us like a full moon at a spring tide, is this insatiable desire to just keep pedalling.

One of many stumbling blocks that we came up against when discussing a long-term cycling trip was how could we afford it. We’re not well-heeled, we don’t do well with savings, we’ve never known the soft swish of a trustafarian dreadlock across our forehead; well at least not the swish of a trustafarian dreadlock of our own anyways.

The possibility of a loan was there, but that seemed reckless, even for us. The prospect of home ownership is also on our list of things we’d like to achieve someday. That said, home ownership does seem to be prioritised slightly below cycling around the world. We’re kinda practical like that.

This deep-seated desire to cycle off over the horizon was present as we lay on that bus in Galway contemplating the ceiling. A couple of weeks later I was chatting to my neighbour, a bus driver, who had just purchased a very decent second-hand bus.

I was a bit surprised as I was sure he’d mentioned that he was stepping back from keeping a fleet of his own on the road. He explained to me that as a result of Covid and the cancellation of every school run in the country, a lot of bus companies were looking at what they had in their yards, selling off buses they didn’t need.

I went onto DoneDeal. He wasn’t wrong. I bought a running, taxed and road ready twenty-one-year-old purple Volvo BT7L for the price of a cheap second-hand car.

The keyboard player in the band I was playing with at the time was a bus driver. Thankfully, he was game for driving it down from Meath to Waterford. Tom had never actually driven a double decker before, but we were sure it was the same principle as a single decker, right?

We scoped out the route on the drive up to Meath, and Tom did several smooth and convincing laps of the bus depot. We were off, and Tom was playing a blinder, but I don’t think he’ll mind me saying that we were both shitting ourselves when we hit a busy M50 on a weekday lunchtime. Thankfully people tend to give a very large purple double decker a wide berth. We pulled into the yard a few kilometres outside Tramore just as the sun set.

We envisaged that we’d spend one year converting each bus. We’d rent a plot of land, we’d put the buses up on Air BnB, establish them as a going concern, pay someone to run the operation while we were on the road, and have the rest of the income to sustain our trip. Simples!

We imagined that we’d also have a thriving business to return to once we returned home.

To say that we were somewhat naive is an understatement akin to saying that Conor McGregor occasionally enjoys playing an aul tune on the Colombian nose-flute.

First of all, converting a double decker bus into a house is bloody difficult, costly and time consuming. We were doing all the work in our spare time, in the evening and at weekends. We grossly underestimated how long it would take. Two and a half years later we finished the first bus. About six months of that was when we walked away from it completely in frustration.

It was all-consuming, we gave up so many other things to work on this purple monster, and it was eating up every penny we were working to earn. It tested us both individually and as a couple. We literally put blood, sweat and tears into converting that bus, but f*@k me, we were proud of it when we finished it after more than two years of hard labour.

Dervla Dekker in all her glory. Video by Colin Shanahan. Music by King Kong Company.

Here comes the next gaping hole of naiveté in our plan. Who in their right mind would rent a plot of land to two dopes and their double decker buses? Is there anyone willing to take that level of bullshit onto their own property?

Thankfully the answer is yes, but they’re not very easy to find. An incredibly kind, forward thinking, indulgent and helpful horse trainer outside Tramore rented us a corner of one of his fields. He referred to us as “hippies with a dream.” We were in business, which led to our next chasm of inexperience.

It turns out that running an Air BnB property, while converting another double decker bus, while holding down fulltime jobs (in a different county in Ellie’s case), and all the while dealing with every other aspect of everyday life is a bit like trying to juggle pineapples while playing The Cuckoo Waltz on an accordion. You might hit one or two right notes and launch some of Del Monte’s finest into the air, but headaches are imminent.

Yet another cataclysmic miscalculation on our part was the cost of running an AirBnB property, especially when you’re renting the plot of land it’s on. Once again this was all much more difficult than we’d initially envisaged, and after ten months of educational pineapple clatters to the head, we decided that selling both buses would be a much better option.

We also realised that the five-star reviews and Superhost status we’d clocked up on AirBnB was as much to do with how hard we were working to make people feel welcome as it was to do with the bus itself. It would be very difficult to find someone to maintain and run the bus to the level needed, and how much would you need to pay someone to empty a cassette toilet on a daily basis!? We also envisaged getting phone calls while cycling through Kyrgyzstan to let us know that the pipes had burst, and the horses had eaten the decking.

After so much loving care and attention paid to converting her, it broke our hearts a little to sell Dervla Dekker, but sell her we did.

She was always a means to an end: naming her after our hero, intrepid cycling legend Dervla Murphy, stands as testament to that. She’s now overlooking Galway Bay, with a library of Murphy’s books onboard, sent to us by Dervla Murphy’s publisher as a gift for the bus named in her honour.

She’s in safe and trusted hands, and we’re happy about that. Well wear to her new owners. The journey of getting her to Galway is a whole other story that’s best told over a can at a bonfire (or maybe in a later post).

Truth be told, a few weeks after selling her, when we didn’t have to do any more change overs or empty any more toilet cassettes, when we could focus our attention on getting her partner Desmond Dekker converted, it felt like a blessed relief. That’s where we are now: about halfway through converting Desmond, tearing into it.

On the strength of the push to sell Dervla, we managed to sell Desmond in advance of completion. We could have sold two more if we had them! We’ve committed to delivering Desmond to his new home in Co. Meath this coming November. You won’t be surprised to hear we’re already a little behind schedule.

Work in progress on Desmond Dekker

Looking back on the last three years, the things we’ve forgone and the colossal amount of work that myself and Ellie have put into trying to get ourselves on the road, we can’t help but feel like we’ve already accomplished a lot.

We’ve learned so many things about ourselves, as well as about four mil countersinks, drill bit arbors, hanging doors, and emptying cassette toilets.

We’ve often talked about converting these buses as something we’ve done ourselves, but even in the telling of this story it’s evident that we couldn’t have done this without a community around us. Tom to drive the bus, Michael to rent us a yard, Richard to let us on his farm, and the people who’ve trusted us enough to pay us for the finished buses.

Add to that list Chrissy who did the plumbing, Wes who finished off the wiring, Paul who made sure the gas doesn’t blow up, Garry fitting the stove, Bourkie with some carpentry, Mac, Anne, Catherine and Stephen who donated timber to us, Davey for sorting cabinets, Spraoi who gave us paint, Trish for sewing curtains, so many others who have offered a helping hand, advice and welcome distraction along the way, not to mention our families who support us in the ridiculous things we do and suffer our absence and lack of attention as we spend weeks on end trying to make counter tops out of scaffold planks and turn pallets into bunk beds. Things like this really do take a village.

When we do eventually finish Desmond, ideally in November, and push those pedals for the first part of our adventure, every turn of the wheel will have been helped by someone. We’re incredibly grateful for that.

We won’t be starting our trip until Feburary 1^st, but it has already been an incredible journey. We hope you’ll stick with us for the rest of it.

Hold her steady and keep it between the ditches!