So You Owned a VW Bus

Take one last ride with us as we take questions from our listeners and past interviewees in the series finale. 

Way back in the summer of 2021, one month before embarking on the trip of a lifetime in our 1979 VW Bus, we called into the flagship show of Happy Productions—a Wednesday night program called The Happy Trucker Show. Now, with the trip behind us, we decided to revisit the interview and run some commentary on our past selves. 

Does a bus need a name? How did our bus, Adie, get her name? Can you rename a bus? We get to all those questions and more in this episode. 

Back in 2018, James and Miranda put their bus, Adie, up for sale on eBay. An unwitting guy from Ohio named Ryan Ireland would buy this bus and later produce a podcast called, “So You Owned a VW Bus.” It’s only fitting that the penultimate episode of the series be with with Miranda and James as they talk about their journey with Adie and the guy from Ohio who bought it. 

The VW bus runs on gasoline and luck, but the inhabitants are often fueled by coffee (as is the case with us). Before we got into the VW part of the interview with Carson we geeked out about coffee and fine wristwatches. And, we gotta say, this guy knows his stuff. 

Carson is a professional musician with a story to share. For him, the VW bus is an emotional journey that has come to define his relationship with his father. 

Bonnie Larsen bought her bus as her marriage of many years was ending. Working on the bus and becoming part of the greater VW community helped her heal and move on, she says. As part of her journey, she opened up an online store, ToolMomStore.com   

Amanda and Matt Hakola have owned a few buses before finally finding their current bus and landing in Oklahoma. Their bus is also the mothership for their business Ragtag Resilience—an approach to stabilizing food systems by doing a lot of little things that add up to change. (They farm their .15 acres and grow lots of amazing foods to feed their family and sell at market.) Their business caught the eye of Leonardo DiCaprio’s personal chef during on-location filming  of Martin Scorsese's “Killers of the Flower Moon" and led to Amanda and Matt catering the film’s wrap party. 

Pat invited us out to camp at his place near the last stand of tall grass prairie in Kansas, where has been working on a novel narrated by a VW bus—an imagined memoir of his VW bus which was salvaged from a field and filled with clues about its past life. 

Join us for the last leg of our 49-state adventure. This season we meet Jarah, the Linnertime DJ at Happy Productions as she makes plans to take her bus on the road. We stop to meet Pat, an author who wrote a memoir told from the point of view of his bus. In Oklahoma, we sat down with Amanda and Matt, two local food advocates who kept Leonardo DiCaprio stocked with fresh healthy foods while he filmed “Killers of the Flower Moon.” In Minnesota we finally caught up to Bonnie, a road warrior whose bus provided her with escape and healing after a divorce. Carson shared the heartbreak of his family’s bus—a story about addiction and anger, recovery and, yeah, even trombones. Then, in the closing week of our 14 month journey, we met up with Miranda and James, the original owners of our bus, Adie. They even brought along Miranda’s dad, Ken, who worked on Adie a lot over the years. And finally—there’s us. Miracle and I sat down (after some urging from our interviewees over the past year) and shared our thoughts on this wild, wonderful time we’ve had producing this series and, as Geoff from season 3 would say, living the dream.