About the Bus!
Name: Pickett
DOB: 1966 in Brussels, Belgium
Gender: Lady Bus
Specs: 40′ and 35,000lbs
Likes: flat highways and pull-thru campsites.
Dislikes: climbing hills and restarting after fuel stops.
Favorite foods: Fresh diesel and 15W-40.
Pickett came roaring into our pretty unexpectedly. We weren’t necessarily planning on making the jump to bus life so soon, but the stars aligned and we spent Memorial Day weekend of 2017 putting in our first 700 miles behind the wheel, white-knuckling it from Grand Rapids, Michigan back to our townhouse in Baltimore.
Our first few months with Pickett were. . . stressful to say the least. There were a lot of hard-learned lessons, enough so that it will hopefully fill many blog posts someday. Here though, let’s talk about why Pickett is Pickett, and why we’re doing what we do.
Pickett’s name comes from two places. For those of you who aren’t up on Civil War history, there was a famous general named George Pickett who led an even more famous charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. It wasn’t successful, but it was a defining and memorable moment in American military history. Pickett’s charge embodies bravery passion, and more than a little bit of desperation. These are all things that tinged our jump to bus life, and it just seemed to fit.
The other reason behind Pickett’s name is a bit more obvious. We lived in our townhouse in Baltimore for two years. We spent two long years working 9-5 “grown-up” jobs, running the rat race, living the life society told us we were supposed to. And guess what? We HATED it. The american Dream is a concept that was tainted long before us millenials got ahold of it, and it quickly became obvious that what we had worked so hard for wasn’t what we wanted. Our white picket fence wasn’t a townhouse, wasn’t suburbia, and definitely wasn’t in Baltimore.
Fast forward to now, thousands of miles and a dozen states later, we’ve somehow become a family of three. I don’t think Pickett will be home forever, but she’s just that, our home.