I’m so frustrated that I have considered selling my vintage bus on multiple occasions. The mechanic who’s been “working” on updating the chassis refuses to return any of my phone calls, text messages or emails. It’s been about a month and a half since I’ve heard from him and each time I do, he keeps slipping the expected finish date by a month or more.

When we originally started this project, he estimated that it would take four months to finish the chassis upgrades. He’s now had the bus for almost 15 months. I should already be living on the bus by now!

Last year was a terrible year for Charlie Lamar (the guy working on my bus). From what I’ve been told, he got a divorce, his boss at his main job got fired, he was injured and then his mother died. I’m assuming he’ll next get struck by lightning! All that would be fine if he’d simply call and tell me what’s going on and help me get the bus out of his shop when it started to take too long for him to finish this project. Instead, he has a habit of just falling off the face of the earth for multiple months at a time.

His last departure from communication is the absolute last straw. I MUST get the bus to a place that can finish the job and am committed to making that happen NOW! So, we plan to abandon our plans to finish up the winter in Florida and will be making a bee-line for California so we can orchestrate getting the bus the hell out of Charlie’s garage, so that one day I might actually end up living in the vintage bus.

Starting on February 8th, we plan to start our journey to California. Once we get there, we’ll park our current bus across the entry to Charlie’s place and wait for him to get home. When he shows up, we’ll try to talk him into showing us what’s up with my vintage bus and to figure out what kind of truck is needed to pull it out of his garage and get it to another location. If he doesn’t want to cooperate, then we’ll get the police and attorneys involved (I hope that won’t be necessary, but who knows, the guy won’t even send a single sentence email or phone message about anything).

I know for a fact that Charlie is alive and well. He’s currently attending a Flxible bus rally in Wickenburg, AZ. I can see him in the center of the photo that’s at the top of this web page looking at a red and white Flxible bus. I’ve even posted to various Flxible bus related online forums to ask if anyone has heard from him lately, but have heard no direct responses related to Charlie. I can’t wait anymore. I need to get this bus finished so I can start living on it.

So far, I have two places I’m considering to bring the bus. One is near San Francisco and the other is in Texas. I plan to visit the Texas possibility on my way across the country and hope to decide where to bring the bus before I get to California.

I’ll be wasting about nine days, driving over 2600 miles and spending about $1200 on fuel just to figure out what’s up with my vintage bus. Sure, I could fly out, but then I’d need to pay for flight, hotel, rental car and I wouldn’t have an real idea for how long it will take to evaluate the condition of the bus and coordinate transportation for the bus to another shop. After all, what if Charlie is out of town (like he is right now) when I show up and it takes 3-4 days for him to show up? And what if it takes multiple days to get all the parts collected, packed and ready to be moved? Charlie Lamar could make this process so much easier by simply calling me to indicate what has been done to my bus and what would be needed to transport the bus… and helping load it, etc. He refuses to communicate in any way and that’s why I must waste all my time and money to drive across the country and deal with all this shit!