2 Months on an off-grid schoolbus in Maine {March & April 2021}
Wow Holy Hell we lived on an off-grid schoolbus for two and a half months. I am writing this after the fact, but just very much wanted to capture that moment in time while it was still fresh.
So, yeah. Covid, leaving the U.K., closed borders, travel, fuckery, blah blah blah we decided to come back to the U.S. and live on our friends schoolbus in Waldoboro, Maine. The thought of landing somewhere supportive and welcoming and with our actual friends in real life, Rob & Amy, quickly started to seem like a no-brainer. We didn’t have anywhere to go back to, no home base in the U.S. whatsoever, so it just made sense to go where we at least had some familiar faces.
We returned to the states going full baller - an uber to the airport, a nice hotel, business class flights, a rental car - all things we had literally never done before and we were sort of laughing at ourselves as that first class experience being the appetizer to living on a bus.
Kris quit his job a few weeks before we left the U.K. and headed to the bus, so the travel week heading back to the U.S. served as the final severance - he basically just never reentered the team and it was glorious. Hopefully our crypto investment plans play out as predicted and I can quit mine by the end of this year.
But anyway yeah, the bus. It was way better than I thought, though I wasn’t too worried as our friends had lived on it for a goddamn year, so it wasn’t like it was their idea in concept - they had lived it. And it was charming as fuck and to have a space to call our own was just so great after all those months of travel. And to be able to really unpack and settle in felt so good.
There is solar on the bus, and plenty of outlets so we were all good there - we had internet, plenty of lights, A/C and heat units, we could charge our devices, all that jazz. But the modcons stopped there. Initially we were pissing and shitting in a composting toilet that had a seat on top of a combo bucket - a shit bucket with a piss diverter. We quickly replaced that with a dedicated shit bucket (a 5 gallon bucket lined with a trash bag and topped with a plastic toilet seat) and completely separate piss buckets - for us it was just way easier to manage, to keep clean, etc.
With the combo composting toilet it was just way more trouble than it’s worth - you lift the seat lid and there are two sections, one for piss and one for shit, but you just sit on it like a regular toilet seat, so this means you have to aim your butthole blindly at the shit opening and not get any shit in the piss trough section and this just sucked. To take a nice shit I need to be able to just relax and let it all go, which I could not do in constant anxiety that I was aiming my butthole incorrectly. Whereas the dedicated shit bucket provided the familiar experience of freedom that my butthole likes. Plus, after shitting incorrectly a few times in the combo composting toilet and getting poo in the piss trough section and having to clean it...just, fuck my life. Funnily enough tho, it didn’t smell - you put a handful of pine shavings on top of your shit each time and supposedly this helps dehydrate the shit which cuts out the smell. But anyway, even with perfect shitting - there was still the issue of having to clean the shit out of the toilet once a week. First of all - the lid doesn’t come off, and second of all, the bucket wasn’t lined with anything so you literally had to dump the shit and pine shavings out thru the small opening in the top of the bucket and then go almost shoulder deep to scrub the leftover shit off of it, it really just made no sense at all. Oh, and did I mention that inside of the shit container is a churner? Yeah, so you have to clean that too. Fucking nasty. And the churner doesn’t really do any good or make any difference as it was very very shallow and really only mixed up the bottom few inches of the bucket. Also once we realized the whole thing made no sense and that the combo composting toilet wasn’t like some ingenuous design bringing us some incredible benefit, we sorta felt duped. ALSO. Okay so like - it’s sold as like - keep the shit and piss separate because it’s the mixing of the two that creates the nasty smell! So just divert the piss from the shit and cover the shit in pine shavings. But like…..once we installed the new dedicated shit bucket - there were a number of times I accidentally pissed in it….and there was no smell. So I mean. What the fuck?
A bucket lined with a trash bag, I mean c’mon! That is light years easier. Also pissing in the separate buckets was way easier because with the composting toilet piss diverter deal - you had to really keep an eye on the piss holding container to catch it before it overflowed and after the third overflow and subsequent cleanup we were like yeah, no.
But the bucket / trash bag / toilet seat is awesome, you literally have a toilet for under $20. I took the seat with me and fully intend to have a bucket handy should I ever need a quick toilet - camping, if the fuckin apocolypse hit, etc. Also funny is Kris’s shits suddenly went from from 20 minutes down to two minutes, and one day I asked, “So it really does only take two minutes? The rest is leisure time?”
And he said, “Leisure time? What the fuck is leisure time? I don't need a break from anything. I don't know what the fucks going on either, okay?'“
Kris used baby wipes on the bus in lieu of being able to install a bidet or hop in the tub to wash his ass and one day I ordered more wipes, but they were arriving a bit slow and he said, “Those water wipes better come today or we're gonna have a real nightmare scenario on our hands.”
For dishes there was a normal looking sink basin, but with a plastic bucket inside of it since there was no plumbing in place. On the side of the sink we had a 5 gallon water vessel with a spigot that we sat up on blocks so it was hovering over the sink bucket and that’s how we would hand wash dishes. For the first month or so we had to refill our sink water in their shower inside the house, which was pretty cumbersome, but once the ground thawed they hooked up their garden hose and we could use that.
For drinking water - they have a well so they were just taking water jugs of tap water and feeding it through a Berkey and getting drinking water from there, so that’s what we did. And when we needed to shower we would just pack up all of our bathroom stuff and borrow their shower inside the house.
The bed was super comfortable, but it was up really high to allow for a bunch of storage underneath, so we had to use a step stool to get into bed. One day we were snuggling in bed and I said, “Oh no, my worst nightmare just happened!” (tweener on the floor) and he peeked over the edge to look and said, “It didn't hit the floor, it hit the stool. That stool just saved yer fuckin ass.”
One night I was messaging with Amy in bed - pictures of sandwiches - and there was one called a “Junior Beef 3-Way” and Kris was sort of half asleep, but he glanced at my phone and saw that written and said, "One time I had a junior beef three-way with these two bitches...."
The first ten days we were there we were following the quarantine rules so it was pretty slow. Our friends were amazing and picked up groceries for us and we were either hanging out on the bus, in the house with masks, or just puttering around their yard and field (they had 7 acres). The field actually backed up to the Waldoboro town forest, so one Sunday morning the four of us took a nice long wander.
Their youngest kid, Finn, was hilarious and knocked on the door of the bus a few times to just come in and hang out. And there was a nice cozy feeling on the bus with the snow and just cooking cozy little bus meals. It was cold as fuck though! Most mornings there was ice on the windows and it was around 40 degrees in the bus. Even with our heaters on we were usually still wearing full winter gear inside the bus to stay comfortable for the first few weeks. Also it would get below freezing inside of the bus overnight, so all of our produce on the counter would freeze (and then thaw) every day, so we couldn’t keep fresh produce around and most mornings everything in the fridge was frozen - like our half and half for coffee. That was very strange. Like every morning we’d have to take out a frozen block of cream cheese and set it in a sunny spot in the window so it would thaw in time for lunch. That was super lame.
Another day we all went out to the LaVerna Preserve Trail, which was a long wooded trail that popped you out on the coast. It was icy as fuck and ice fuckin sucks to walk on - we were sore in the most fucked up way the next day from how you have to walk on ice so tense and weird.
The first thing we did on our own after the ten day point was borrow their car so I could get a goddamn haircut. That was luxurious. And it was so novel to be out driving in a car after not driving for 6 months in the U.K. And just to be out on our own, to go and buy our own groceries and be independent was great. Waldoboro itself is a small town, but had everything you might need. About 10 minutes down the road was a slightly larger town, Damariscotta, and it had a little main street, more grocery options, a weed store, a fuckin amazing sandwich shop, a nice butcher, and a nice waterfront spot where we enjoyed McDonald’s several times whilst sitting in the car enjoying said view. He kept goofing on the butcher’s advertisement of “custom cuts” and walked by whispering, "Gimme the dick."
A couple of weeks in my dad dropped off some of stuff we had put in storage at his house before we left for the U.K. We were dying for our espresso machine, our cast iron pans, and a few other key kitchen items and also our fucking Dyson vacuum - that was so handy on the bus. And it was so novel to have even just a small taste of our “stuff” with us after living out of backpacks for 6+ months. One day we got some nice ass steaks from said butcher and cooked up a ridick dinner, one of many suprisingly good dinners we banged out on that bus. We hadn’t yet unpacked all of the kitchen stuff on the bus and one day Kris exclaimed, after looking for .5 seconds:
Is our pizza slicer active?!?
(Meaning: has it been unpacked)
Me: Yes
Him: Well then where THE FUCK is it?
Another day we were out and about and everything was super busy and we realized it was some kind of regional holiday and everyone was off. I said, “Ugh. Hannys (the grocery store) is gonna be so busy right now. We're gonna get ass fucked.” And he didn’t miss a beat saying, “Well, we better put our fuckin plugs in then!!”
Another day he asked, “Are you havin' that lil bitch tortilla? That thing doesn't even deserve to live. I should just put it out of its misery.” (lil bitch tortilla = the last tiny one from the old bag). And then Finn asked, about the sprinkles on the cupcakes I made, “What are these tiny little balls?”
Another day Amy took us out for a nice long drive down the Bristol peninsula and showed us some other beaches. We stopped at C. E. Reilly & Son, an adorable little grocery store where I got probably the best piece of crumb cake I’ve ever had in my life. It was like a 3-1 ratio of crumb to cake it was so insane. And we took our treats and drove down to the Pemaquid Lighthouse and sat at a picnic table on a beautiful lookout point and hung out for a while.
There is an old German church and cemetery a few houses down that is accessible from our property and we walked over there a couple of times and it was really beautiful:
One afternoon we drove about 90 minutes south to Portland, ME which is sort of the only big city in Maine. We wanted to go to the one Trader Joes in the entire state of Maine that is located there and also just explore a bit. It was windy frozen ass cold though so any big exploration plans we had were pretty thwarted, also I had to pee and we started to get hungry and it almost went downhill until Kris found this BBQ place — Wilson County Barbecue — and we got there and it was fucking adorable and we had the best meal of our lives, so - crisis averted. But seriously, it was so cute. They had a big patio with lights and big fires and picnic tables so we sat outside. I had the bbq platter and it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Every single element was just perfection. And then we went to the TJs and stocked up on some staple favorites in addition to getting shit for Rob & Amy and that was just hilarious - I’ve never gotten that much shit there, Kris and I each had a cart full.
Did I meantion it was cold on the bus? It was really fucking cold. Here’s my boyfriend with a hot bevvie standing in front of a propane fireplace with a heating pad crammed up his flannel, plus some other cozy scenes:
It was insanely frikkin beautiful though and it was so nice to have so much space right outside our door.
Another day we borrowed the car and went out to Owl’s Head Beach to take a walk, but it ended up not being much of a walk because all of the beach front was inaccessible and the walk was super short and came to a dead end at a nearby lighthouse. We got back in the car to drive to another point and randomly pulled into a parking lot so I could take a picture of the darling ass post office and the parking lot ended up being for the Owls Head General Store, which we then went inside and got more delicious treats from. The general store thing here is really cute. I got a bomb ass giant ass piece of moist as fuck gingerbread cake with a fat ass layer of whipped cream on top. We took our treats and stopped at another beach, but the thing about Maine beaches is that they are hella fucking cold and mostly rock. So I mean. Yeah. We awkwardly sat on a gigantic rock to eat our treats while the wind thwapped in our faces and then got the hell outta there.
It was maple sap season so we had a couple of Saturday’s where Rob tapped all the trees and then setup a burner in the front yard to put gigantic vats of the sap on a slow boil to turn into syrup, which took literally all fucking day long so we were all just hanging out together out front and it was super fun.
Another cool walk we did was just right in town - we looked on the Waldoboro town website and there were a few walking trails listed so we went to check one of them out. It was really funny, it ended up just being down a dirt road and the parking lot had room for about 3 spots and we were the only ones there and it was insanely quiet and sort of eerie to just be alone in the woods, like it was the perfect scene for an unsolved murder. It was called the Burkett Mills Preserve.
I did really enjoy the fuck-it attitude of Maine and I bought my first pair of Crocs ever and had some wonderful fashion moments. I also scored a fuck load of lounge wear at Goodwill, which helped my overall lewk.
I mean……
One evening there was the coolest fog everrrrrr. The light was just unreal and they moon was super bright and it was so incredibly quiet and spooky. We went into the field and it was crazy to have such thick fog that you couldn’t even see the woods. But yet have the light of the moon. It was wild. Also we randomly found a light up frisbee in the yard and threw that around, which made it even cooler. It was like a goddamn episode of Stranger Things.
We drove up to Camden one day, which apparently is “fancy Maine”, ha. We loved it. It had a very cute main street full of quaint shops and cafes. We had amazing sandwiches from the Camden Deli and had a picnic overlooking the water.
That was pretty much all of March and April was more of the same, though it did start to get a bit warmer, so we weren’t waking up in the arctic tundra every morning. But with the warmth came the ticks and that was a real bummer real quick. We made tick socks (from Hanes comfort crew socks we bought at the Walmart), but it still made going outside such a fucking to-do. He was funny about the socks though and kept exclaiming, “I'm part of the comfort crew!” The black flies were also really gross and one day we were discussing black flies not liking light clothing and he said, “They won't like me when I put 'em to the fuckin ground.”
The month started off with a bang though as we got our new grinder delivered!! It was something we have wanted for a long time and was equal to a month’s rent - the kind of money we’ve never had at our disposal to spend on a physical luxury item. So it was very novel. Kris immediately made me a latte with my beloved Oatly barista milk and I cried when I took the first sip because it was so good. And also just for everything it represented being at that point and what we had accomplished.
Most of the shots came out spot on, but there were variations with different beans that we tried. He had pulled one that was not great and he said, “This shot is barely acceptable.” and I said, “That's what she said. Last night. When she was looking at your dumb ass dick.”
The bus was still not level and that was starting to get to us a lot. It affected everything and even made it hard to cook - like we had to prop up one corner of the burner so the pots wouldn’t just slide off. I felt like my back was hurting from just having to exist at an angle for so long. Finally one day they tried to get the wheel unstuck, but ended up making it worse. Thankfully it only stayed like for a few days until they were able to get a bus mechanic out to the house.
Kris was also continuing to do his Skype French lessons and was getting really good. One day I said, “By the way, i took a huge shit (in the bucket a few feet away) during your French class, i bet you didn't even notice, huh?” And he deadpan said, “No. I was speaking French.” The shit talking literally never stops though. One day he said, “I like how earlier you just had a cookie and didn't even ask me if I wanted one and just ate it right in front of me.” Another day I knocked his shoe down the steps and I didn’t pick it up and he said, “I'll be out after i remove this baseball bat from my ass.” One morning he said, “Jesus we are such assholes when we wake up. And then throughout the day we get like 2 percent better…. And then…. Assholes again.”
Then we got our vaccine appointments! That was very surreal. We got them together at the site in Booth Bay and walked around the little town center afterwards. I bought a mug to commemorate the occasion.
Booth Bay is where we got vaccinated and I was feeling all the feels of the last year and everyone who has suffered and is still suffering and the inequitable distribution of the vaccine and friends in Brazil who won't see it until next year and Italy who hasn't even been able to dose all the 80s and everyone who has died and their families and everyone dealing with long term symptoms and recovery and who the fuck was I, just some nobody sitting in some really nice clean facility next to my jackpot of a boyfriend, both of us getting a shot from some lovely nurse for free and so yeah, we walked around after and i got this fucking mug to capture the moment, okay?
We felt super duper tired, like ready for bed at 3pm type thing, and my arm felt like it was going to fall off, but otherwise we were fine. Fuck, the arm soreness though. One morning I literally needed help putting on my socks. I said, “I need help with my socks.” And he said, “You're gonna have to just wear your slippers for now. Cuz me bendin' down and squatting ain't gonna play right now.” (cuz he had to shit that badly and may have shat his pants had he squatted). After we started feeling better we went on some more nice woodsy walks.
We started to get really super stir crazy, especially with the ticks and the heat and with not having a car and then Amy’s parents showed up in their R.V. and we were still just hanging in limbo with these very hypothetical plans for the future and it was just weird as fuck. One day Kris had been looking at cars and decided to call his old drummer friend who was also a car salesman and ask him about the car buying process, paying cash for something, etc. and the dude advised him not to do that (pay cash in full) and it was sort of like an aha moment. Like, duh. Obviously finance a car. Because if you take a big chunk out, it’s no longer in crypto continuing to grow. And the amount it will appreciate staying in crypto dramatically outweighs the interest rate of a car loan. That sort of blew our world wide open because we had been thinking our ticket out wasn’t until we could take out a large chunk and pay upfront for a car.
So all the sudden it was like oh fuck, we could buy a car right now this minute because we could afford a monthly payment easily. And it was pretty fuckin’ nuts. Literally the next day we bought a car sight unseen from a dealer in New Hampshire, and the day after that we went and picked up and then were like well, wait a minute. Now we can leave the bus, too. So fuck. More craziness. Also we super duper did not want to get the second vax on the bus knowing that it would most likely be like having a terrible flu and we’d need all the creature comforts we could get. We went on Airbnb and spent several hours narrowing down the limited options that were even left for such a last minute jaunt. And we picked some random place in Connecticut and just hoped for the best. So suddenly that was it. In the span of like 3 days, suddenly we had bought a car and were leaving. It was nuts ass. Also, the night before we left, we had a fucking mouse in the bus for the first time and I got bit by a tick and Kris had to dig it out my leg with tweezers, so if that isn’t a sign it’s to gtfo, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, on a Friday we drove to New Hampshire to pick up the car, Saturday we spent packing up the bus, Sunday we spent cleaning and then Sunday evening we had a farewell taco dinner inside the house with them and just sort of reflected on everything that had happened. And then the next morning we left. So yeah. Our time on the bus came to a frantic and dramatic close, but it did end with us buying a Porsche, so I mean…..