Alice The Skoolie - Life on the Road
Meet Alice the Skoolie
Alice started with a love of traveling.
We took a 45-day trip around the country in our Jeep, and somewhere along the way we realized something: we weren’t ready to stop exploring.
We wanted to keep traveling, but we also wanted to keep doing the things we loved. We were already making money at festivals, and we discovered that we could make as much money at festivals as we could working our regular 9-to-5 jobs.
That got us thinking.
What if we didn’t have to keep going home between festivals?
What if, instead of paying rent on a place we weren’t living in full-time, we could take our home with us? We could go from festival to festival, keep doing our hobbies, make a living, and explore the country along the way.
That’s when the idea of living on the road started to make a whole lot of sense.
And eventually, that idea became Alice.
Alice is our 34-foot converted school bus, our home, our way of traveling, and a big part of how we live and work on the road.
It’s definitely not the conventional way to live—but after falling in love with traveling, we knew we wanted a life that gave us the freedom to keep exploring.
And that’s what Alice has given us.
How We Found Alice
Our first thought was actually a van.
Then we started looking at RVs, but we couldn’t find anything that really worked for us. We needed enough room to carry all of our store inventory, along with the raw materials we needed to keep making our products. The layouts of the RVs we were looking at just didn’t make sense for the way we wanted to live and work.
And honestly, the price wasn’t what we wanted to spend either. The camper we were looking at was around $25,000, and that was more than we were willing to put into this idea at the time.
Then we found Alice.
We were staying at a Hipcamp, and we found a yellow school bus for sale on Facebook Marketplace—only about five miles away.
She wasn’t converted. She was just a yellow school bus with 22 seats.
But she had the things Carmen was looking for: the right engine and transmission, the right length, and she wasn’t 40 feet long.
And she was $3,000.
So we bought a school bus.
Then came the fun part—figuring out what to call her.
We tossed around a bunch of names before settling on Alice. We liked Alice in Wonderland, and Alice happens to show up in a whole lot of songs we love.
So Alice it was.
And she’s been Alice ever since.
Turning a School Bus Into a Home
When we bought Alice, she was still a yellow school bus with 22 seats.
The first thing we did was take all of those seats out. That left us with a floor full of holes where the seat bolts had been.
So what do you do when you have a bunch of holes in the floor?
We covered them with pennies.
Yep. We adhered pennies over the holes to cover them before we started building.
From there, we insulated the floor, walls, and ceiling and started turning a school bus into a home.
We did the entire conversion ourselves. We couldn’t afford to hire someone to do it for us, so we figured things out as we went. Carmen had some construction experience, and we learned a lot from YouTube.
We even built our battery bank from individual cells that we ordered ourselves to save money.
We worked on the bus full-time, taking time away from work and festivals so we could get Alice finished, move into her, and get back on the road.
The entire build took about 14 weeks.
There are videos of the building process on our social media, so you can actually watch Alice go from a yellow school bus with 22 seats to the home she is today.
And that’s part of what makes Alice special to us. We didn’t buy a finished RV and move into it. We built our home ourselves, one piece at a time.
Inside Alice
When you walk into Alice, there are three steps and the driver’s seat is directly in front of you.
Turn around and you’ll find a long hallway that runs all the way toward the back of the bus.
Immediately behind the driver’s seat, on the right side, is our kitchen.
We have an eight-foot countertop with a two-burner stove, refrigerator, convection oven, and a deep sink. There are drawers underneath for food and storage, along with overhead storage for canned goods and boxed foods.
We even have crocheted hammocks hanging over the counter where we keep fresh vegetables.
Across from the kitchen is our loveseat, couch, and end table. This is where Michelle does most of her crochet work.
Further down the bus on the right is the bathroom, with a shower and composting toilet.
Across from the bathroom is Michelle’s dresser with our icemaker on top.
Beyond the bathroom is Carmen’s leather workstation, where he makes all of our leather hats.
Across from his workstation is our closet, dresser and leather storage area.
At the very back of Alice is our bedroom, with a queen-size bed.
The bed is raised, which gives us a garage underneath for storage.
It might sound like a lot to fit into a school bus, but we’ve learned how to make every bit of space work for us.
Alice Off-Grid
One of the things that makes Alice work for us is her ability to live off-grid.
Our setup includes:
- 2,000 watts of solar power
- 1,200 amp-hours of 12-volt battery storage
- 2,000-watt inverter
- 30-amp shore power
- 100-gallon fresh-water tank
- 100-gallon gray-water tank
- Composting toilet
- Shower
- Propane on-demand water heater
- Diesel heater
Living off-grid has taught us to pay attention to resources in a way we never had to before.
We always have to think about how much water we’re using, how much electricity we’re consuming, when we need to dump our tanks, and how long we can stay somewhere before we need to find more resources.
It’s just part of living in a house that moves.
Our Business on Wheels
Alice is also part of our business.
We run Hippie Haberdashery, where we sell handmade crochet pieces, leather hats, festival clothing, and other unique goods.
When we first started, our festival booth was much smaller. We sold Michelle’s handmade crochet, Carmen’s leather goods, and some hippie clothes, and we didn’t have nearly as much inventory as we do now.
Since then, we’ve expanded to TikTok Shop and our website, which means a whole lot more inventory—and a whole lot more stuff to carry.
Eventually, Alice wasn’t quite enough space for everything.
So we added another vehicle.
From Festival Booth to Traveling Caravan
Our second vehicle is a transit van that we named The White Rabbit, keeping with our Alice in Wonderland theme.
The White Rabbit gives us extra space for inventory and everything else that comes with running our business on the road.
Alice is still our home, but now the two vehicles work together.
We’re not really just traveling in a school bus anymore.
We’re more like a traveling caravan.
Alice is home.
The White Rabbit carries the stuff.
And together they let us keep doing what we love while we travel.
What We Love About Living in Alice
The thing we love most about living in Alice is that we always have our home with us, wherever we go.
Even when we’re traveling or set up at a festival, I still have my own kitchen, my own bed, and my own bathroom.
At the end of a long day at a festival, we don’t have to pack everything up and drive somewhere else. We can walk back to Alice, close the door, and we’re home.
She’s cozy. She’s familiar. She’s ours.
No matter where we wake up, Alice feels like home.
Home just happens to have wheels.
Making Alice Work for Us
We honestly don’t have a long list of things we dislike about living in Alice.
That’s because whenever something makes us uncomfortable or doesn’t work the way we want it to, we change it.
We’ve never been very good at accepting, “Well, that’s just how it is.”
If something isn’t working, we figure out how to make it work better.
Adding The White Rabbit is a good example. We were starting to feel cramped with all of our business inventory, so instead of just putting up with it, we found another solution.
Carmen does miss having a big garden.
It’s not exactly easy to have a garden when your entire home is moving down the road.
But overall, we’ve built Alice around the way we actually live.
She doesn’t have to be perfect.
She just has to work for us.
Life on the Road
We travel with Alice and spend much of our time living nomadically.
That means our home moves with us.
We have to think about things that most people never have to consider when they leave the house—where we’re going to park, how much water we have, how much electricity we’re using, where we’re going to dump our tanks, whether a road can handle a 34-foot bus, and what happens when something breaks hundreds of miles from home.
We’ve learned that bus life is a combination of freedom, adventure, problem-solving, and occasionally saying words that probably shouldn’t be repeated on the internet.
But that’s part of the adventure.
What We’ve Learned
After years of traveling and living this way, we’ve learned there is a huge difference between dreaming about bus life and actually living it.
We’ve learned how to make a small space work.
We’ve learned how to live with less.
We’ve learned how to fix things ourselves, conserve resources, find places to park, travel with our business, and make a home wherever we happen to be.
We’ve also learned that there isn’t one right way to do this.
You figure out what works for you, and then you change it when it doesn’t.
That’s pretty much how Alice came to be what she is today.
Follow Alice’s Adventures
We share our travels, bus life, festival adventures, problems, solutions, and the everyday reality of living on the road.
You can follow Alice the Skoolie on our social media and come along for the ride.
We also share the things we make and sell through Hippie Haberdashery.
And we’re still out there exploring, learning, changing things, and figuring it out as we go.
More About Alice
We’re going to keep adding stories, adventures, lessons, and behind-the-scenes looks at what it’s really like to live and work in a converted school bus.
Because Alice isn’t just a bus.
She’s our home, our business partner, our transportation, our storage unit, our workshop, and the place we get to come home to no matter where we are.
Welcome to our little home on wheels. ❤️