For those who have been following our progress of our bus conversion to a motorhome, office, school and mobile billboard for our mission to Transform Children’s Health, One Lunch Box At A Time, you will know we were expecting Santa to deliver us a completed bus for Christmas. (If you haven’t been, you can catch up on the blogs here).
Well we did get a present wrapped but not quite the completed bus we were expecting. And our trailer which we are having custom built was also suppose to be ready this week. It wasn’t either. We are somewhat disappointed and have had to reassess all our time frames because both the bus and trailer are now unlikely to be ready until about January 15th. We still then need to have it sign-written once we receive it, then of course move our lives into it.
Here’s a couple of pics that Israel took when he visited Newcastle today with the kids.
Decluttering
The positive from the delay means we have more time to finish our declutter, and possibly to make more pragmatic choices about what we really want to store. Last week we managed to sell all our large pieces of furniture from our client meeting room and our lounge room, plus a lot of big pots from the patio – to the one person. It was such a relief.
For now, we are living amongst boxes and piles of ‘stuff’ – marked to be taken with us, to store, give to cousins, give to friends, give to Vinnies etc. You get the picture.
Distance Education
Indrani’s interview with her new Distance Education teacher went really well. Israel and I are really pleased with the school and it’s approach to education.
Essentially every 2 weeks, Indrani’s teacher Tobias (she is impressed because she doesn’t have to call him Mr …) will email her directly her parcel of work for 2 weeks. She will download it, and do the work from an ipad. Israel and I will supervise her doing the work. It then get’s sent back to her teacher by email and he marks / assesses it.
Other items
Well I now hold my licence to drive a bus. Yep, I did it. I reversed parked an 11 metre bus. I parallel parked an 11 metre bus. And I drove on a free way. I can tell you 3 things.
- 80km in a bus is FAST!
- If you see The Root Cause bus alongside a park with it’s hazard lights on, it’s because I was driving and I have stepped out from behind the wheel so Israel can park it.
- I have utter R.E.S.P.E.C.T for bus drivers now. How they drive a bus in peak hour traffic with 50 people aboard is beyond me.
Still I am proud of myself. I achieved my goal – I am licenced. I will share the driving load as we go around Ausrtalia (within the constraints of not reverse parking it).
And this month we also received our design of the outside of the bus and trailer – and it rocks! And we also now have a map of our rough route around Australia. See these two items here.