This is the bus (black velvet and his little brother sitting on the stairs) after we got the mechanic from up the road to drive it to the caravan park because neither of us had a bus license yet and frankly we were both a bit wary of driving such a huge old beast. The caravan park was at Avoca Beach NSW and was the only one that would allow us to stay for more than a week. It was a pretty sketchy place full of single men living in dirty caravans with lake on one side and swamp on the other ( I dont think the ground dried up once in the whole six months we were there) but we were happy! We finally had our own little space that we could do whatever we pleased with.
The tape above the passenger window was holding a piece of metal on where a window used to be which weve since reinstalled and the plastic bag and tape on the left-hand side is where we removed a window and the rubber to see if we could get replacement rubbers the same or some made up. The answer to both of those was no, so we reinstalled the 50yr old rubber until we came up with an alternate solution ( they are still there)
Rabbit hutch in the foreground. When we moved into the bus our family consisted of two humans, one dog, one cat, one rabbit and a rainbow lorikeet.
The bus after her first paint job. We scraped, sanded and painted her all by hand as the only two power tools we owned were a jig saw and a drill. We spent ages trying to decide what colours to paint her, originally I had wanted a nice shiny red or brown and cream but then freaked out for some reason and thought green would blend in better when we were parked places we probably shouldnt be. Dont know what I was thinking as if something that big was going to go unnoticed. The colour on the roof was called 'lettuce' which still to this day cracks me up because it reminds me of a joke Jimoen told about a snail eating his letters (corny I know) can't remember what the bottom colour was called but we used exterior weathershield paint.
