Sarah & River
Model:
1967 Riviera Conversion Bus
Name:
When she came to North America, she was a panel van, and they didn’t sell well. Companies were converting them into camper vans, and one of them was Riviera. The name River just popped into my head one day.
Color:
She was originally Lotus White. Somebody took a spray can and painted her dark blue with a yellow pinstripe all the way around, which I love.
Mileage:
On this motor, probably 30,000; maybe 70,000 total.
Motors:
She’s gone through a couple of motors.
Owned since:
2015
Owners:
She was originally from Canada. I found her in a barn in Idaho, where she had been sitting for seventeen years.
Location:
California
Favorite driving song:
I don’t listen to music, because I’d rather hear the motor.
I found her in Idaho. She had been in a barn for about seventeen years. She was originally from Canada and was very rusty. She came to me at a time of my life where I needed a project, and so I broke her down into little bits and was able to get her back on the road in about two years.
She’s been a bit of an escape pod, and it’s fun. The whole Volkswagen community is kind of a tribe. I love having the freedom to drive and also camp. She has gone to Canada a couple times. Once with my younger son, and when he was fifteen, he read twenty-seven books during that drive. I just did a huge trip to Burlington, Wisconsin, which is a little bit shy of five thousand miles. I went to visit my mom’s grave. She wanted to be buried back there. She’s been gone fifteen years, and I had never visited her, so I followed the route that she had taken on a train, and it took about twenty-six days.
I drive the route by myself. There’s a little bit of a challenge there and a little bit of pride to be able to do it by myself. The first year I went, I was really intimidated because I didn’t know anyone. I was mostly worried that they were gonna leave me behind. I’m a pretty good driver, and I have a really good sense of direction. The next year, I knew I could navigate myself out of places.
Last year was pretty intense with the water—we just had so much rain. There were seven Buses that didn’t make it through the rivers, and we had to pull them out. The years before that it’s been just the dust bowl.
This year was nice because we actually had snow. There were forty Buses. The bigger the group, the harder it is to wrangle everybody. So a couple of us went out a day early and set up camp, had a bonfire, and relaxed and talked, because nobody ever really talks on the trip—we are all driving.
The next day was a full day of driving about ninety miles in a snowstorm, and it ended up as an out-and-back because there was too much snow and we couldn’t get over the pass. It was really fun and really beautiful. I just kept thinking, I get to do this, this is amazing. There were some people who put their Bus in a ditch—thankfully I did not.
I had issues with the cold, though. My clutch pedal kept getting stuck down. At first, I thought I lost the cable, and that’s fixable, but not on the hill. Then I got down the hill and looked. There was this huge glob of ice on the clutch. I took a screwdriver and knocked it off, and then we were off again. This year I spoiled myself and put in a diesel heater. It was so warm. That was the best 150 bucks I’ve ever spent in my life.
I grew up as an only child in Yosemite and we traveled a lot. There was something magical about seeing other places that were wild. So I always look for that. I love to camp. You can really detach from your phone and all that stuff. That’s important. It’s an escape. I can read books and not worry about anything. I just love it.
I came home from the hospital in a ’57 Beetle and then my dad sold that for a ’67 Beetle. I remember sitting in between the seats of the ’67 Bug and thinking the radio had people in it.
Then they bought a Bus and we spent six weeks going to
Alaska——it was magical. We put the Bus on a train. You’re in the passenger section and you’re looking back and there goes your Bus.
My first car was a ’71 Bug, and I promptly realized that I needed a bed. I worked in Tuolumne Meadows—I had to get up at five in the morning to go cook—and my roommate had a lot of “visitors,” so I needed a place I could sleep. I ended up selling the Bug to my former college roommate and buying a Bus. It was orange and white, and I named it the fifty-fifty Bus. I went everywhere in that thing. There’s just something special about Buses. You go slower, you go hotter, you have to plan when you drive. I try to limit my miles in a day so that I don’t just drive. I get to see things. I usually give myself a 250-mile radius and pull over and look.
I think there’s some sort of fear that people have about driving by themselves, and it’s a shame because there’s so many cool things to see. I hate how quickly bad news travels, because I think it scares people. If you trust your gut on a lot of things, nothing is going to happen. You can see magical things and camp in really safe places and do it all on your own. I feel like we always have a safety net. Back in the day, I didn’t have a cell phone. No one did. Trust your gut.
I think that there’s a culture of nomadic caravans. You find your people. There’s something crazy about these vehicles because they do okay off-road, and you can go to really cool places and camp, you sleep in your vehicle really easily. They are such an iconic thing. And if you grew up with them, as I did, it’s nostalgic. I sat on my mom’s lap all the way to Alaska in the Bus, no seat belts, it was just a different time. We went for miles and miles and miles, and it was a good time and it was all dirt. Now I’m most comfortable on a dirt road.
When I’m driving I can process a lot of things, things that I might not want to journal about or talk to someone about. As I drive, I solve my problems, come up with solutions. Even though it’s probably the loudest vehicle out there, it’s just quiet in my head.
River and I go on an annual trip called the Shasta Snow Trip, about eight hundred miles, all off-road, in Northern California. It is a little hardcore—it’s usually about twenty or twenty-five Buses, and they all have to be ’67 and older. We do it on Super Bowl Sunday weekend. This is my tenth year driving the Shasta Snow Trip and its twenty-fifth anniversary. It’s not a dedicated route; it changes year to year. There’s some beautiful country you can’t even believe is in California that nobody ever sees. It’s really fun to see it in a Bus.
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It’s generally guys, and it is a really broad spectrum—there are different political stances and very different communication styles, but everybody rallies. It’s really one of those moments where you think we, as a society, could make it, because we are all getting together. We’re all working hard. And that is the point. The people make it great.
One year, the founders made a sweatshirt, and the joke was that I was chaos coordinator, because I’m always like, “You guys need to turn left. You’re going the wrong way.” It’s kind of a running joke—it’s like, “Sarah, where are we going?” I can get caught up in being the guide, but then I think, No, I’m not doing that. We all get to have fun, one person doesn’t have to be the official navigator. So last year, I really enjoyed myself. Just have fun. Don’t try to organize. It’s really fun to be out there with these guys—they sass you, and I actually love it because then you kind of know that you’re not like just the person over there.
The question I always get is, “Are you scared?” I had an incident on a recent trip—not in my Volkswagen but in a modern car. I had an incident with a bear, and that was scarier than any person I’ve ever dealt with, because it was unpredictable. People also often ask if I’m carrying a gun. I carry bear spray, but I’m scared to use it because what if I hit myself? The gun question only started to happen in the last ten years. Before that, it was “Who works on your Bus?” So it’s always loaded. If I say I do, then I open that can of worms, so I answer and walk away. I’m not a mechanic, but I can figure it out.
