The Magic Bus

When I checked in at the campervan rental center, the lady pointed out to the parking lot at a regular sized van with one of those little ‘hats’ on the top that give you a little more headroom and said, “There she is.”

My brow furrowed. I scratched my head. My campervan was much bigger, that couldn’t be it. “But I ordered the Adventure Star Deluxe. It’s supposed to sleep three people.”

“Yep, that’s the one.” She shrugged, “I don’t think I’d try to sleep three people in there but I guess you could if you had to.”

I cursed the Internet. The picture on their website had made it seem so big and luxurious that I thought I’d be driving through New Zealand with flashing lights and a Wide Load banner. How do they do they make it look so big? Is there a special camera I can buy next time I’m trying to sell my house?

A month before we left, when I had put our deposit down, Sara and I were so busy that we never saw each other and this week in a campervan seemed like such a grand adventure. We’d be free to travel wherever we wanted, wouldn’t need reservations, wouldn’t need to pack our bags for seven full days, and we’d have our very own mobile bathroom. I hadn’t really given any thought to the fact that by the time we arrived in Christchurch, we had been traveling for three months, together twenty-four hours a day. That’s thirteen weeks, 2,184 hours, or about 131,040 minutes depending on how you look at it. What I’m trying to say is that we had been spending a lot of time together, certainly more than we were used to. We were getting along pretty well, all things considered, but the strain was beginning to show. The last thing we needed was to cram ourselves into a tiny van for a week.

And tiny it was. There was three square feet of floor space in front of the door and two square feet in front of the stove. The rest of the van consisted of the bathroom and the sofa-table-bed. The bathroom was a joke, just a tiny toilet with a drain right next to it and a showerhead right above it. The only option was to sit on the toilet to take a shower. I realized that if I timed things right I could probably kill two birds with one stone, but the mental image didn’t appeal to me. Our sofa-table-bed, of course, required a lengthy, almost acrobatic, conversion any time we wanted to change the living room into the dining room for example. Back in Chicago we would get arrested for keeping two dogs in a crate this small.

As we crammed our belongings into our new home, Sara’s encouraging remarks were unable to mask the trepidation written across her face. This whole campervan adventure had been all my idea and I was beginning to regret it already. As we piled the stuff that didn’t fit in the cabinets onto the sofa-table-bed, we knew we were testing Trailer Trash Rule #1: If your luggage doesn’t even fit in your campervan then you’ve drastically undersized.

At least we would have the freedom to go wherever we wanted. It wasn’t like we needed to stay in those cheesy campervan ghettos we had seen on the way, with cinderblock restrooms and a mini-golf course. I pictured our little van parked in a grassy knoll in the middle of a national park, lush woodland on the right, and a crisp cool mountain stream, the kind they use to brew Hamms, on the left. The great outdoors would be our home.

“Here’s how you flush the toilet,” the woman said as she moved three levers, pushed a button and counted to three before moving the levers back to their upright and locked positions. “Most people don’t use it though, because after a couple of days it really starts to stink.” Hmm.

“If you use the lights and the heater at the same time, you can usually get about two hours out of the battery so unless you don’t mind the cold you might want to stay where you can get an electrical hookup.”

A tired Sara, a hungry Sara, a dirty Sara, a cramped Sara, and even a sweaty Sara, are all incarnations of my wife that I know I can love and adore. A cold Sara does not make the list.

“I wouldn’t worry about it though, most of the campervan parks have electrical hookups and public bathrooms. Some even have mini-golf courses.” So much for the land of sky blue waters.

That first night we stayed at a little campground just east of Arthur’s Pass. There was nobody there but us. It was in a little grove of trees with nothing but the bathrooms and an old abandoned trailer that looked like it belonged to an axe-murderer. And there were sheep, of course, it was New Zealand after all.

After a pathetic little dinner of canned ravioli, we spent the next hour turning our dining room into a bedroom. We really started to get an appreciation of just how small our little prison was. We moved all the extra stuff from the sofa-table-bed to the front seats, and then dismantled the table, and then attached the tabletop to the two benches, and then spread the cushions across our wooden bed, and then fit the sheet over the cushions, and then spread out our sleeping bags. I still couldn’t figure out where the third person was supposed to sleep. On top of the stove? As we tried to get comfortable in our bed, I made a mental note of Trailer Trash Rule #2: Never, never, ever, brush the crumbs from dinner onto the benches.

Staying in a deserted campground, although pretty creepy, had one huge advantage. When I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak, I just whizzed next to the van rather than taking the long walk to the bathroom. As I did my business, looking up at the glittering ceiling of stars, I spotted a shooting star. Without hesitation, I wished that we would get through the week without a divorce.

The next morning, as we were reversing our bedtime process, I had just put the pillows into an overhead cabinet and I thought I had closed it properly. As soon as I took my hands off of it, though, the wooden door swung down and cracked me on the bridge of the nose. Twenty minutes later we were back on the road and I was behind the wheel with a butterfly bandage and two black eyes. Trailer Trash Rule #3: Always try to fit in with the neighbors.

And boy did I fit in that night. Most of the people were permanent residents of the campervan park, living in tiny trailers smaller than what we had. There were quite a few buckteeth and at least one or two Uncle Dads. Since their trailers were so small, they all wandered around the park all evening trying to look into our Adventure Star Deluxe. We left the next day as soon as it was light.

Our next stop was the Black Sheep Campervan Park and Youth Hostel at the Franz Joseph Glacier. We had planned on staying just one night, hiking on the glacier the next morning, and heading south the following afternoon. Unfortunately it rained for two days straight and there wasn’t enough visibility for the chopper to take us up on the glacier. We hunkered down and waited.

Now there is almost nothing to do in Franz Joseph except climb on the glacier or watch the grass grow and it was too rainy to do either. So for three days and three nights, we sat in our little hellhole. The rain pounded out a tango on our roof. The damp musty rain smell mixed with the funk of our dirty clothes creating a delicious stew. We read. I wrote. We checked the clock. We checked the calendar. We stared at each other. We agreed on Trailer Trash Rule #4: Always, always, always have enough hard alcohol on hand to get you through a rainy day.

The third night in Franz Joseph was December 6th, St. Nicholas day. Ever since we’ve been married, we’ve celebrated our own little Christmas on that day, leaving Christmas Day free to celebrate with out extended family. Despite our tight quarters, we were determined that this year would be no exception. We bought a stocking just for the occasion and hung it from the pathetic little skylight. The only Christmas tape we could find on the west coast of New Zealand that early in the season was Snoopy’s Rock and Roll Christmas. We put it into the van’s cassette deck, and turned it up loud so that we could hear it in the back.

We both knew we weren’t getting anything big, there just wasn’t room in the van, but we enjoyed exchanging gifts to the sounds of The Ode to the Red Baron. Afterwards we sat on our respective benches, soaking in the holiday mood and listened to ‘The Gang’ sing Silent Night and other yuletide hits until we got just a few too many stares from our fellow campers as they trudged through the rain on the way to the bathrooms. We turned the music off and I started to cook Christmas dinner. I had to take down the stocking, though, because it kept hitting me in the head as I fried the grilled cheese sandwiches.