So You Owned a VW Bus

Take one last ride with us as we take questions from our listeners and past interviewees in the series finale. 

Way back in the summer of 2021, one month before embarking on the trip of a lifetime in our 1979 VW Bus, we called into the flagship show of Happy Productions—a Wednesday night program called The Happy Trucker Show. Now, with the trip behind us, we decided to revisit the interview and run some commentary on our past selves. 

Does a bus need a name? How did our bus, Adie, get her name? Can you rename a bus? We get to all those questions and more in this episode. 

Back in 2018, James and Miranda put their bus, Adie, up for sale on eBay. An unwitting guy from Ohio named Ryan Ireland would buy this bus and later produce a podcast called, “So You Owned a VW Bus.” It’s only fitting that the penultimate episode of the series be with with Miranda and James as they talk about their journey with Adie and the guy from Ohio who bought it. 

The VW bus runs on gasoline and luck, but the inhabitants are often fueled by coffee (as is the case with us). Before we got into the VW part of the interview with Carson we geeked out about coffee and fine wristwatches. And, we gotta say, this guy knows his stuff. 

Carson is a professional musician with a story to share. For him, the VW bus is an emotional journey that has come to define his relationship with his father. 

Bonnie Larsen bought her bus as her marriage of many years was ending. Working on the bus and becoming part of the greater VW community helped her heal and move on, she says. As part of her journey, she opened up an online store, ToolMomStore.com   

Amanda and Matt Hakola have owned a few buses before finally finding their current bus and landing in Oklahoma. Their bus is also the mothership for their business Ragtag Resilience—an approach to stabilizing food systems by doing a lot of little things that add up to change. (They farm their .15 acres and grow lots of amazing foods to feed their family and sell at market.) Their business caught the eye of Leonardo DiCaprio’s personal chef during on-location filming  of Martin Scorsese's “Killers of the Flower Moon" and led to Amanda and Matt catering the film’s wrap party. 

Pat invited us out to camp at his place near the last stand of tall grass prairie in Kansas, where has been working on a novel narrated by a VW bus—an imagined memoir of his VW bus which was salvaged from a field and filled with clues about its past life. 

Join us for the last leg of our 49-state adventure. This season we meet Jarah, the Linnertime DJ at Happy Productions as she makes plans to take her bus on the road. We stop to meet Pat, an author who wrote a memoir told from the point of view of his bus. In Oklahoma, we sat down with Amanda and Matt, two local food advocates who kept Leonardo DiCaprio stocked with fresh healthy foods while he filmed “Killers of the Flower Moon.” In Minnesota we finally caught up to Bonnie, a road warrior whose bus provided her with escape and healing after a divorce. Carson shared the heartbreak of his family’s bus—a story about addiction and anger, recovery and, yeah, even trombones. Then, in the closing week of our 14 month journey, we met up with Miranda and James, the original owners of our bus, Adie. They even brought along Miranda’s dad, Ken, who worked on Adie a lot over the years. And finally—there’s us. Miracle and I sat down (after some urging from our interviewees over the past year) and shared our thoughts on this wild, wonderful time we’ve had producing this series and, as Geoff from season 3 would say, living the dream. 

Oh, the Sullivans! We love these people. Jarah is the daughter of Emma and Shawn Sullivan, our friends and podcast syndicators at Happy Productions. Jarah is super cool and is carrying on the family legacy in more than one way. You should check out her band, Dellwood, and definitely listen to her radio show Linnertime, which airs on Happy Productions from 2-6 p.m. Monday-Friday. 

Jesse "VW" Marshall is back for a third episode. We chewed the fat and then Jesse boiled it down into and put it into his Vanagon. He has his own method for making biofuel and walks us through his process. 

Colin Kellogg of Itinerant Air-cooled fame has logged more miles on the road than most humans. When you live on the road full-time in your VW bus, you sometimes bed down in strange places and make friends (and enemies) out of your nighttime visitors. 

VW people are by nature obsessive people. Maybe obsessive isn’t the right word. We are driven, passionate, and—well, obsessive, might be the right word. Oftentimes, we have interviews where our VW bus owner reveals they have another passion. Perhaps the best example of this is Birding By Bus. Marc and Eliana are professional birders who had so many stories to tell, we thought it was only right we bring them back for a detour episode that focuses on birding. And this detour might hold the record for our farthest fetched episode: they will take us all the way to Attu, the most remote island in the United States. 

Jeremiah Woods is the owner and operator of a bed and bus-fest called Camping in the Woods. Each rental unit is a decked out VW bus themed around a movie or an idea. Located in Golden, British Columbia, the scenery is stunning. It’s no wonder Jeremiah was able to secure a sizable check from the Canadian version of Shark Tank called Dragon’s Den. 

You’ve probably heard of Birding By Bus—the personal endeavor by birders Marc and Eliana that turned into a world-traveling business. We had a chance to catch up with these two in Wasilla, Alaska, and hear all about the start of Birding by Bus and how it became an online sensation. And, if you’re anything like me (a real dunce when it comes to our avian friends), you’ll probably learn quite a bit. 

Zach Wallace has just about the coolest fleet of vehicles in all of Alaska—a squad of Vangons, including a Syncro. Luckily for those who travel north to Anchorage, he rents them out. Last Frontier Westys has been in business for only a couple years, but his love for VWs has been around for, well, generations. 

Tim from Tok. Is there any other way we could cap off this season than with our Alaskan road savior? We were in sorry shape when we were towed into Tok. And we were complete strangers to Tim, yet he and his wife Maria were welcoming. They shared their time, expertise, food, and wisdom with us while Miracle recuperated from her long-standing injury and the bus was repaired. Before we got back on the road, Tim was gracious enough to share his memories of coming to Alaska and finding his split window bus. He weaves in his philosophy and also outlines the laws of the land here in the far north. 

George is a young guy with enough stories to fill a lifetime thanks to his Vanagon… and his Subaru. Even though he lives and works in Homer, his adventures have taken him south to Mexico and everywhere in between. We caught him on his break at Buttwhackers just long enough to catch a few of his stories. 

Pete Wedin is a fishing boat captain and guide who let us camp out at his place in Homer, Alaska, for a couple of nights. We all became fast friends. We sat down with Pete over a halibut dinner (excellent by the way) and a couple of cocktails. Following in the long tradition of seafarers also being experts storytellers, Pete regaled us with tales of the bus he owned forty years ago when he first came to Alaska as well as his current project—a bay window he is restoring.