 Yo, good morning everybody. Good morning from Portland. We're crossing the bridge right now. I'm getting the hang of driving this big old bus. We've got Michael Navigation-Noor in the back. What are you doing back there? I think he's up to some mischief. I think he's up to some mischief. This is Jack's school bus. I'm walking around with new seat belt on. And I just did something to his seat, which he doesn't know about yet. But I guess I'll find out when he edits this or when he sees it later. But yeah, we're, I don't know where Jack ever headed. You said we're headed to, probably guess, the bus is in great hands. You know, rip seats or anything, right? No, not at all. Used to make me these, and then I actually made the recipe better. I put sea salt on top. It's really good. You like them? Yeah, I tried one. They're actually really good. And not actually, they aren't really good. Yeah, nice. Well, let's go make some friends and pass out some cookies, because that's what I made them for. Okay, you guys want some cookies? All right, here. They're pumpkin chocolate chip with sea salt on top. Maybe I'll have half of it. Not life, yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Yep, take a whole one, take a half, whatever floats your boat. There's plenty here, so. I'm going for half, we'll show there's enough. What do we think? What do we think? You like that? Cookie? He sent me photos and he's like, dude, I found a good bus. And I'm like, no you didn't. He's like, yeah, Danny sent me photos. I'm like, dude, that thing is so clean. Like there's no way. They must be like some staged photos or something. So, scale one to 10, how clean are we in the bus? I've personally never seen a frame this clean. That's like, what is this, an O2? Yeah. I mean, it's still got full black coating on it. Like, I think you said in a previous video you can eat off the engine. We could make breakfast off an engine and serve it to people. Like, it would pass health codes. Yeah, it's clean. Yeah, I think so too. We got a couple of viewers that came down. Hey guys, want to introduce yourselves? I'm Nate. Cool. Derek. Sweet, thanks for coming down guys. Appreciate it. Thanks for being here. My pleasure. But, okay, so we have a nice backdrop of people, but please introduce yourself. My name is Shauna. Shauna. Yes. Shauna is a perfect example of a very kind person who came down and just hanging out with all of us, checking out our rigs. Do you want to get a van or a bus at some point? You have one. This is my little hoopty. Yes. Should we do a quick van tour? Is it built out? But, I mean, it's built out though, right? I mean, I haven't had it that long. It's kind of sort of, yes. This is great. This is so stealth because I didn't even realize it was like a van life van. This is a retired USPS van that I took in partial trade for my vintage motor home that wound up being a big old money pit. Oh yeah. So yeah, it's... Less stuff, less stuff, less stuff to bring. Oh, that's awesome. So yeah. That's fantastic. This is the funny thing. So this is actually extremely comfortable. Okay. And underneath, I have five five-gallon buckets. Okay. That basically support it. Support it, yeah. And storage too, right? Oh yeah, make a storage. I use those, put my stuff in it, yeah. That's very ingenious. And I've got a little DVD player in here too that I can play. I've got a deep cell battery with a converter up underneath over here. Here, I'll show you. Okay. This is so amazing. I had no idea there was a built out van in this little, was it a little wind star? Yeah. It has 90,000 miles on it. Yes. I love it. Excuse the mess here. Oh, no, no, no. I mean mine gets... Oh my bananas, that's where they went. Yeah. I'm a good lord. I have the same issue. Yeah, I see your little battery there. Yeah, that's my battery. My converter's on the other side, hiding back there. And when I have my kitty, I have an 18 year old cat. Oh wow. That likes to ride with me. Cool. So that's her little section down there when I have her cat. Are you doing full-timers? Is this like an adventure? Not right now. Not right now. I was kind of thrown into this. Okay. Which I've been watching you. I've been watching Carolyn RV. I love her. I love you too. Oh, thank you. But you know, I've been watching you guys and realizing to myself, I spent a lot of years in real estate, managing apartment communities. Yep. Been there down that? Yeah, putting people out on the streets. And you know, not being that nice person that I know that I am. And I thought, you know what? I'm sick and tired of making other people rich. Yeah. That $1,500 a month for rent for a one bedroom apartment is ridiculous. This thing is probably only to 200 bucks. But hey, I'm gonna pay rent. That's amazing. It's the bottom paid for. Yeah. Insurance, that's it. Yeah, when we were filling up earlier at the gas station, we said, oh yeah, it's my bus and I'm gonna live in this and that. The guy said, oh man, you're so smart. I paid 2,200 bucks and it just disappears. All that money goes to somebody's country club membership dues or something. Right? It's easier to spend half as much than it is to earn twice as much. Absolutely, you can put more in savings and you can have more fun with life. Awesome. It's all good? Oh, let's hug it out. Oh, it's so cool. All right, so met up with Michael from Oregon and Michael, what did you recently purchase here? Purchase an MCI-5, 79. Mm-hmm. And it's a Saudi edition. So it has the door in the back, which annoyed me because all the Saudis don't like women walking past them. They actually had assisted on MCI building a middle door so the women wouldn't have to walk past them and use the back door. Whoop. Which really caused me a lot of extra work. So the women essentially had to use the back door and then the men were in the front, huh? Yeah, and then women couldn't walk past them for some reason. Yeah. So they do that Islamic stuff. Yeah. Which is crazy to me. Interesting. But it has this double roof on it, which is, but they said this side of an orchard for about five or six years. Yeah. And under there, there's all kind of debris and I have no idea how to get it out. Very long toothbrush. Yeah. And this is the front door. I'm going to weld the actual door together, maybe 16 gauge, your friend said, and make it one piece so I can just open and close it. So that's just makeshift right there. I guess the company purchased it from a place in Pennsylvania. And they turned it into a games lab. You know, drive around to parties and had all kinds of computer stuff in it. Oh, that's fun. But it was all ripped out. Seats had to be ripped out. Slowly but surely it's coming together. Nice. I have no idea what I'm doing. Well, join the club. I've always wanted to meet Pandemonian and, you know, it's so weird meeting you folks because you follow you and then here you are. Here we are. Hopefully just like we are in the videos. You don't have a cracked screen, but time to get through. This is part of the kitchen. I'm going to have a small refrigerator in there. Fantastic. Not drawing too much power. I picked this up with a good will for $3. Nice. They wheeled it out and it's like Ikea. That's great. How much that is for you to take it? This is where the stove is going to be. Great. But I'm not going to have a propane stove. I'm going to have one of those electrical things. The less propane in the cab is probably the better way to go. Thanks for coming down, dude. Really appreciate it. And what's your channel? ClearSki the Creepers. Check me out. Love to have you aboard Creepers forever. All right, man. See you, dude. We have an official truck driver giving me a tour of how to pump down my air brakes here. It looks like he's going to fire it up. Where are your... There's the air tanks up there. Is that it? Yep. All right, so we want to make sure that... So when you start to lose air pressure, there's a certain point. And I believe it's going to probably be right around either just above the six of you're in that range. So is this level? Yeah, kind of. I'm a little weary about disengaging your brakes. Yeah, it's not going low. Oh, OK. Yeah, maybe not then. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to depress this, which you'll hear that break go. It'll go pss. Right. You're going to want to be on a level surface. And you're going to want to simply just a pressure break and you're going to hear the pss. And all you're doing is you're lowering your pressure. And now if this is disengaged and this is functioning correctly at a point of... It's been a little while. At a certain point, you'll get down, your alarm will pop on, you'll hear a beeping sound, very loud noise. And then at a certain point, I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or 40, this should pop out, OK? That is the indication that if it does not pop out, you have an issue, OK? So what that does is so when you're driving down the road and this thing starts to leak and you don't realize it or whatever, it's a safety measure and it will pop out and it will lock you up. And that'll stop you from careening off the road. That's why on the freeways, you see those big trucker like Screech, OK? Or you see the big gravel pits where they lose their brakes coming down the road because they burn them out because they're too hot or you put too much pressure on. A pump down test is simulating that. So you depress it, press it and the alarm will kick on. It'll goes to a certain point and it'll pop out on you and then you're good to go. Then you build it back up, you get past outside the red zone and you pick it up back up to 120 and then you're good to go. Sweet man. Dude, you could have saved my life with this small explanation. So thank you very much. No problem. Well, OK, first of all, what's the name of the rig? You know what? I don't have a name yet. I mean, I know that's a horrible thing, but I don't have a name for it yet. Oh, Mystic Hot Springs is a great place. Oh, man, that place is amazing. And for everyone who doesn't know, would you please introduce yourself and name and channel? Yeah, my name is Paul Barger and that's also the name of my channel. It's Paul Barger on YouTube and I'm a van lifer and I live out of this RV converted bread truck full-time. And how long you been doing that? I left full-time October 20th, 2017. Cool. So I've been at it for a year, nine months, something like six, seven, eight months. Before that, what were you doing? I was a full-time, I was a deli manager at a grocery store down south. So did you used to be a deli manager or something? We delivered tortillas. Oh, yeah. OK, cool. Several grocery stores. Yes. So yeah, I was a department manager at a grocery store and I worked there for about 10 years and I just had enough and changed up my whole life and decided to do this. And how's it been so far? Any regrets? No, no regrets. I have no regrets whatsoever. How's your happiness account been going? Not like your money account, bank account, but like before, where was it and where is it now? It was pretty low before. And my career, I don't want to be a downer. My career did end at that place because I lost my dog and that was like my best buddy. He was like my first real dog that was all mine. And when I lost him, I just kind of reevaluated what I was doing in life and decided to make a huge change. He made a huge change in my life for the positive. So I decided to do that again and go out on the road and do this. And so you've been pretty happy, then? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I miss my dog, but aside from that, it's so much better than working that job that was like draining my soul. Working to pay the bills, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, could we get a quick tour? I know this is like the power set up, so. Yeah, so this is, it's kind of hard to see, because I started building my closet over it. But it's a little messy right now. I got to meeting it up. But this has just been completed recently. Cool. I got 380 hours of battery bank. I got a 2,000 watt power inverter that also is a charger, so I could plug in the shore power. And a MPPT controller. That's sweet. That's great. I can run my office back here. Wow, it has a desktop for mobile computing in a van. That's amazing. Yeah, I have a full desktop. You know, it's pretty recent. I mean, this is like a 2017 Beats by Dre desktop. So it's a pretty powerful computer, and I like using it for video editing and stuff. So I just built this apparatus where it's locked in here. It's so stealthy, you would never know. And I like the height in here, too. You guys can't see. I'm 6'1", and I got plenty of room. But I like how stealthy it is. On the outside, it just looks like a bread truck. Yeah, it's totally basic and plain outside. It's like a little New York City apartment. If anybody's from New York City, how much would this cost? And this guy's living life here rent-free. I love this. This is 112 square feet. So that's a pretty big studio apartment if you take it into New York City. Right? I mean, we're talking like 1,000 or more in New York City, right? For something this space. That's incredible. Look at it. This whole side is all to be completed. Yeah, I understand. This will be kitchens. This will be from here forward. It will be bathroom. Oh, nice. Those are water tanks. I just have to install a bunch of stuff. 246 gallon tanks. I hear you. One will be fresh. One will be gray. I do some dumpster diving. So this is my kitchen countertop I just found. Nice. It is a butcher block on one end countertop here. Repurposing. Very ingenious. My whole office and my solar box here, built this little flip out table. Oh, nice. This is all built from a dumpster, or a dresser that I found in the dumpster. Perfect. Yeah, nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I like the character of the stuff, too. I think it looks cool. Yeah, it has a story, too. Yeah, I found this behind a Walmart or whatever. Yeah, I was in Anaheim after I went to Disneyland. See, there we go. It was from like a shopping mall. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Down here, I also picked a bunch of wooden drawers. They're solid wood, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to install them in my closet over there. Really? I like it. I'll have a couple drawers here that'll slide out, and then over there, I'll have a couple drawers. Cool. And then, if anybody wants to know what the front looks like, get in a nice stick shift device here, and then. The front is low priority, so I haven't done very much. Also known as stealthy, because no one would ever suspect someone is literally living in a panel van bread truck. So cool, man. Thanks for the tour. Thanks. Bye, guys. Bye. Thanks for coming down. Thank you. Thank you for having us. My friend, how are the cookies? How are the cookies? They're amazing. Are you just saying that, or is that the truth? I'm not bsing, I promise. So good. All right, see you. Bye. So we're going to get a quick tour of Jed and Evie's pop-top Chevy Express. Hi-top. Thank you. Not a pop-top. So Chevy Express extended. Thank you, extended. And if you guys don't know these guys, hit the subscribe button. Super rad people. Great authentic van lifers. So what do we have here, first of all? 1997 Chevy Express cargo extended with a 24 inch double bubble high top from Fiberin. Fiberin, yes. Double bubble. Say that like five times. Double bubble, double bubble. I didn't even know I could say all that. I'm impressed with myself right now. And the bubble top, high top was a recent addition. In like December, yes, like five months now. Was that hard to install? We didn't install it. We didn't install it for us. Yeah. Would have been now. Yes, you have to cut the whole roof. I mean, you could have done it, but the high top itself is so heavy that you would need some sort of crane or something to put it up there. Yeah, you need a crane or a lot of friends. Yeah, because ours actually had wood inlays so the whole top is the half an inch plywood in there and then two by fours on the side so we can put cabinets in there. We can drill holes. We can put 350 pounds of stuff on top of it if we want to. So it's very reinforced and very heavy. Nice. All right, so can I follow you into the van? You want to give me a tour? Go back here and I'll go right here. Welcome to the crib. Oh, sweet. LED lights. We got fairy lights. These lights have a bunch of different lights. We can just up here, I guess, the kitchen. This is our kitchen and then we have this table that pops up like that for more counter space. Excellent. We have our sink, just regular kitchen faucet and then you put this on turn on and it's running water in there. And then here we have our tanks. We have clear water, gray water, and then the pump is back all the way down there. Just an Amazon electric pump that we got. Excellent. And then on this side, we have our sliding garbage can. I need one of those on my next one. And then like silverware in here and then some canned food. And then over here we keep our cooktop, which is induction. Oh, it's kind of dirty. So you guys, you guys run that off of the lithium battery in here. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it takes quite a bit of power. So we use it if we know we're going to be driving or something, then we'll use it at nighttime. If we park at nighttime already, like we're not going to go anywhere. We try not to use it only because it will take a lot of power. So we might not have enough power left over for the fridge or something by the morning time. But in that case, if we're like our battery is low, I have a little this thing that I think plugs into it and you can cook on top like an emergency thing. So yeah, so the reduction cooktop works amazing. Boils water very quickly. And then you have to use a special pot for those two, right? Or a pan. Yeah, they're like stainless steel works really well. I think there's a couple of other metals that do anything magnetic. Cool. The worst magnets somehow. I'm not sure how that works. Interesting. I heard about it recently. I was like, this is our kitchen. They usually have paper towels here out. And then I put this thing in here. Not too long ago, when we were in San Diego, we stayed at our subscriber's house for a little bit and she was going to throw it away and I told her no. So I painted it and welcome it on here so I can keep my big things. Nice. Excellent. Yeah. And then out here, we have our pantry of all of our food. And then down there, like extra pots and pans. It's kind of a messy right now. Yeah, I understand. And then out here, we have our fridge that slides out. Nice. And it's a dimetic like that. And then it opens up. So yeah, it works great. The railings. Yeah, don't do the railings unless you get like super like sealed bearing ones. These things get dirt in them all the time, so I constantly have to clean them out and relube them. And it's a total hassle. Yeah. So I mean, it's a great theory. It works, but it needs an upkeep for sure. So yes, it's very cozy. And so do you guys sleep side to side? OK. Yeah. This way, it's just long enough for us to fit. We're both, I mean, we're both pretty tall people. Yeah. Fits perfectly. We didn't do any like heavy insulation. So if you see the ribs over here, so we put this insulation and then just put the paneling in between so that way we can actually fit. If we would put paneling over the ribs, we wouldn't be able to sleep this way. Gotcha, you'd have to do some kind of diagonal thing or something. Yeah. Yeah, we stick to warm climates. We don't go anywhere that's even close to freezing. Yeah, same. Yeah. And then this is our bed. We build it with PVC piping. Oh, that's right. I've never seen that in a video. Pipe and then just plywood and then the mattress and then we put a bunch of holes in the plywood so it ventilates. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. And that's super light, super cheap PVC, just hacksaw and glue. And yeah, that's it. Super red. And then underneath, we just have a bunch of storage, just big containers where we store, like, you know, winter clothes and camping stuff and, like, our gear and stuff and cameras or whatever. And then our batteries down there and that box down there. And then inverters underneath there. And yeah, I think that's it. Sweet. And this is, like, the closet, clothes. Closet, clothes. And then this is our, like, brains, if you want to talk. You want to talk about this? The brain. The brain of the operation. This is a solar controller, which we don't have solar panels, but we can't figure out how to mount them yet. And there's a fuse box. You can kind of see from this area. Oh, yeah. There's a fuse box back there and controllers for all the lights and stuff. Yep. So that's kind of like the little central area for that. Fun. And I had a guitar cab down here and a bass amp. And then I had a guitar amp in here. So I had that and then I stored a guitar in here, two guitars in here, but I took them out and I'm going to put those in the Astro now. I'm so impressed with how much stuff you guys can fit, like, in a van. Right? Yo, here I am thinking, like, I'm in a bus, like, I need more space. But, like, true van lifers get so creative and, you know, minimalism at its finest here, you know? I mean, we do have quite a bit of stuff in this van. Like, we have a lot. Yeah, I mean, for like a, you know, a small space like this, this is great. And then extra storage because of the pop top. So, and then a couple of fans. Two Max air roof vents. So we'll have one second air in, one second air out. That's amazing air flow. So it's nice and cool in here all the time. Yeah, they have thermostats on them too. So, like, before you go to bed at night, you could turn on the thermostat and have that one in the back blow air right on you in the morning. Oh, nice. And then this one, you set a couple of degrees warmer. You know, it's going to be really hot and that'll suck all the air out. Which also comes from the front because we'll have, like, the two front windows cracked with the, I don't know if you can see the window louvers, I guess they're called, spoilers? I don't know what they're called, these things. So we can leave these windows cracked all the time. Nice. That's super, super nice. Excellent. Dude. Storage over there, yeah. Thanks for the tour. Yeah, for sure. And so great hanging out with you guys. And the reason they are here is because Seven hit, I think, all of us up, right? Kind of coordinated. So we had this, like, group meetup. Tons of people came down. So yeah, it's just fun to have, like, an all-in-one sort of thing. I mean, I think we should do this more often. I do too, it's not her that really. Yeah, it's not fun. Every state we go in, we should have a little meetup. Group meetup or something. Yeah, like, with other, you know, so then more people just come in general and can, you know, it's almost like a little mini RTR of sorts. Yeah. All right, now, I don't know if we said hello to Seven yet, but let's go say hello to Seven. Hello, Seven. What's going on, dude? I was just shutting my doors. So I didn't watch your video last night when I was picking up Michael, but Seven just ripped out a bunch of stuff. Now, why? I want to stuff everything. Why? I want the breaking news, the sneak peek. Because I got a new mattress. Awesome. That's why everything had to be taken apart. Holy crap. So basically what happened was I discovered that the memory foam mattress that I had, which was six inches thick, was causing all this hip pain where I was having massive pain in my hips and I couldn't walk more than 45 minutes without limping. And so my friend Paul said, do you want me to turn off the new mattress? No, that's fine. My friend Paul said, why don't you try this other mattress and see if it works better for you. Just sleep on it here in the garage. So I slept in his garage one night. It was fabulous. And he said, well, why don't you put it in your rig for a while, sleeping it for a week and see how it is. So I slept in it on this mattress in my rig for a week and loved it. And the hip pain started going away and I was feeling so much better. And that was like three weeks ago and it's just fabulous. But the new mattress was 10 inches thick. So I went from 40 inches high plus six inches. My mattress was here up to about here. Oh my God. And now all of a sudden I only had this much room to the ceiling and I was having trouble crawling up. I couldn't get on top of the step because my mattress is 50 inches up and I have to throw myself sideways into it. So I'm like, okay, I've got to pull. I've got to lower the bed. Yeah. The problem was the kitchen cabinets are attached to the bed frame. So I had to take down the kitchen cabinets to get the bed frame. Is that all your everything? It's everything over here. And the benches that I had the fridge inside of were too tall because of the height of the fridge. And so I'm like, well, I've got to rebuild one of the benches and lower the benches. And so I'm changing the benches. I've got to take apart the kitchen. I had to take apart the garage and the bed. And this is what's left. Seven, I. So the new mattress. Well, you know how the van life is glamorized with people, certain people on Instagram and whatever. This is the reality. It's sometimes you got to take it all apart. So anyways, thanks for the Dose of Reality Seven. And thank you for organizing today. It was probably one of the funnest like meetups with us and meetups with other people that I think I've ever been to. Cause like we got to visit with everybody. Subscribers, other people with channels, people who just love buses. It was fun. So thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you for making it out. And thanks for showing up for your new bus. Oh yeah. Well, my pleasure. You'll see it soon when it's done. It's so much different. What? Is it nice? Like good different? Oh no, no, it's good. It just minds a lot more like. Oh, I see it. I sit on. I don't know. I think it's adjustable. I'm not sure. Probably. Anyways, so it had a fantastic, honestly, great time out here. Very intimate. The thing I like about the smaller meetups is that you can get to know people one-on-one, face-to-face, and see people behind, who's behind the account, the channel, the comment, the like, et cetera. And actually we're heading to, I just didn't see the car, but there's a car. We're gonna follow the, some very nice subscribers came out. We actually, we both met them at the tiny house festival. Yeah, back in September. That's right. October? September. Don't remember. September. Very nice couple. And heading back north and said, hey, do you wanna go for happy hour thing and appetizers and all that stuff? So we are heading out. I'm letting Big Mike drive the bus. I don't let people drive my buses. Not cause I, not cause I don't trust people, but driving a bus is different than driving a car. And so I just, yeah, but he's a pro. Yeah. I've done about 30, 35,000 miles in my school bus. So I have, I know a thing or two about driving the air brakes. Fire the thing up. We gotta let it, you know, click. Yes, click, click, click. Anyways, battery's about to die. I appreciate you for watching and we'll see you in the next video.