gentlemanfurby:

mediokrek:

toni-tan:

shelbyrosesarles:

I’m gonna do this. Travel around the US with three of my bestfriends.

Wow, I’d love to do this

Well, let’s assume we buy a school bus, as pictured.  As a fun aside, my uncle owns a used car lot and has a school bus there.  It’s pretty neat.

Anyway, where were we.  Right, school bus.  Let’s say we go for a standard fare, type C school bus.

We said we wanted an older model, so let’s say a 1996 S-Series, which is built on the International 3800 bus chassis by Navistar International.  This is probably the kind most of us grew up with.

Now a cursory search say’s you’re probably looking at $5,500 for the bus, which isn’t bad.  But let’s keep in mind gas prices.  From what I can see, gas mileage for a school bus can range from 5 mpg to 12 mpg, so let’s take the midpoint and go with 8 mpg.

Let’s say we want to take this bus on a half decent road trip.  Let’s say, Seatle to Los Angeles to Dalas to Chicago to Boston.  This trip hits most major cities along the way. Really, an ideal roadtrip to cover all your bases.  That’s 3866 miles.  At 8 mpg, that’s about 483 gallons of gas.  At current average diesel gas prices, that’s $1945.

That’s… actually not as bad as I thought it would be.  Given you could bunk a good dozen people in a school bus at least, that gives about a total cost of $620 dollars each.  Adding in potential other expenses and repairs, that’s maybe $1000 each.

Huh…

I started on this tirade to try to show how awful an idea this would be, but it’s actually not that expensive.

…

Anyone want to go halvesies on a bus?

I want to do this so badly ohmygod