[Editor's note: The following is a the beginning of a serialized story about traveling from Connecticut to Minnesota to pick up the bus for the Juan Way tour.]

Flickr user somjuan

In January 2008, John Paganetti, a Zen-like senior at the University of Connecticut and a friend of mine from high school, started trolling eBay for decommissioned school buses. His plan, hatched partially out of boredom, was to buy an old school bus, convert it to a more affordable biodiesel engine, and grab some buddies for a summer road trip. The market for old school buses, it turned out, was surprisingly competitive. John was outbid for weeks. Finally on Feb. 4 he entered the winning bid of about $2,000 for a 1989 Blue Bird Conventional with an International chassis resting in a lot up in Dexter, Minnesota.

A couple days after John placed his winning bid, he talked on the phone the seller, a mechanic named Kim Wilson. Kim owned a massive used vehicle lot. He and his small staff would work on the cars that came in, negotiate the sales, and relax in the hot tub he had installed in his office at the end of the day.

Winning the online auction had been the easy part: Now John had to go halfway across the country and actually pick up the bus. But he had midterms looming and wasn’t sure that he would have the time to make the journey 1,400 miles west and back until spring break, in mid-March. Kim said it wasn’t a problem and promised he would hold onto the bus for as long as John needed.

Ali Telmesani and Max Wareham agreed to make the trip with him. The three of us had attended Middletown High School in Connecticut with John. Ali, a year younger than John, had followed him to UCONN. Max and I had both ended up in New York City; I study philosophy at New York University, and Max studies jazz guitar at the New School. I found out that they were going to be accompanying John to Minnesota when Ali was visiting Max and me in early February. I desperately wanted to go with them. The trip had always seemed like a distant pipe dream to me, but John’s purchase of the bus suddenly presented a road trip across America as a reality.

I am, first and foremost, a writer, and this seemed like the opportunity to tell the story of a lifetime. It was an adventure, perhaps the most ambitious one I would ever have an opportunity to participate in. Not only that, but it would give me an opportunity to travel more and see more of the United States in a few months than most people will ever have the opportunity to see. So when John asked, I told him without reservation that he could sign me up for the entire road trip.

But as much as I wanted to be part of the first leg of the journey to get the bus, my spring break didn’t line up with UCONN’s, and I had midterms to contend with. So John, Ali and Max would have to make the journey on their own, and I extracted a promise from them to tell me every last detail of the journey. That is what you are about to read about.

Continue reading the story here.