Why we went from a bus to a van—and wanted a bus again.

The first answer was a bus

Our first moving home was Tío Aventura, a 40-foot school bus we converted in 2018. We went from a house to around 280 square feet and spent two years traveling in it.

There was a lot to love about the room it gave us. There were also places where its size made traveling with friends in smaller vehicles more complicated. Both things could be true at once. We could love the bus and still wonder what a different vehicle would make possible.

Then we wanted to move more easily

A one-day swap with a friend’s van in San Diego made that question much harder to ignore. Easier parking, air conditioning, fuel economy, and the ability to move around in something smaller all appealed to us.

Our Sprinter conversion began around the start of the lockdowns. We fitted a living room, workspace, full wet bath, kitchen, and bed into about 14 linear feet. The tour makes more sense when you know what we were asking of it: keep the functions of a home while giving us a much smaller vehicle.

That van chapter lasted three years. It was a real home, not just an experiment between buses.

Parenthood changed the brief

After we had a baby, more space mattered again. So did a different pace. We no longer felt the same need to travel so quickly.

In July 2023, we brought home a 2005 IC RE300. When we wrote about it then, we pictured more part-time travel and possibly having a place to park it and stay for a while. We were planning around our daughter as well as ourselves.

That distinction matters: wanting a bus again did not mean wanting our old life back. It meant taking what we had learned and asking what would fit the family we were now.

You are allowed to change your mind

It is easy to make a vehicle choice feel like a declaration. Bus people. Van people. Full-time travelers. Once you have shared a version of your life publicly, a change can look bigger from the outside than it feels from the inside.

We think there is room for a simpler explanation: your needs changed. The thing that worked can deserve credit for working, even when you are ready for something else.

If you are choosing between a bus and a van, start with your present life. Who needs room? Where do you want to go? How often do you want to move? What does a comfortable day indoors require? Our answer changed more than once. Yours is allowed to, too.

The Sprinter tour captures one of those answers in detail. Watch it as a home designed for a particular chapter, with all the choices and compromises that come with that.