[Editor's note: This is the last post in a serialized story about traveling from Connecticut to Minnesota to get the bus for the Juan Way tour. Read posts one, two, three, and four.]
On the afternoon of March 12, John and Ali finally arrived in Rochester, Minnesota. Kim’s brother picked them up in a car that practically resembled a golf cart, and drove them to Kim’s parking lot in Dexter, Minnesota, where the bus had been waiting for John for a month. To say that the lot was in the middle of nowhere does injustice to just how desolate its surroundings were. They could see it on the horizon from miles and miles away, and once they arrived, it seemed like barren infinity surrounded it on all sides. Despite its barren surroundings, the lot itself held hundreds of cars, in all shapes and sizes. John realized why it wasn’t a big deal for Kim to hold onto the bus for a month; in a lot of this size, another old school bus was nothing.
Kim, his wife, and his employee Brandon gave Ali and John a brief tour of the place, including the office with the famous hot tub. Kim seemed to love his job. He served them both screwdrivers. It was the first time Ali had ever seen John drink. Kim and his wife treated the two travelers to dinner at a sparsely populated, plain little local bar that night. Ali, drunk and exuberant, staggered back and forth on the steps to the door of the bus and called his sister, me, and his friends Peter and Melissa to tell them the good news.
Kim offered to let the two of them spend the night at his place, and Ali, yearning for a warm bed, wanted to accept. John, however, demurred for the both of them. After the seven-day trip to Minnesota, he just wanted to get back to Connecticut as soon as possible. What had started as a pipe dream to occupy John’s boredom was well on its way to becoming a reality. But the bus was still just a bus; John had a year and a lot of hard work ahead of him to convert the bus to burn biofuel, add cots, and prep it for a summer across America. It turns out the trip to Minnesota was the easy part.
