Home On The Road

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Because they were preoccupied with their jobs, bus people had little time to make the commitments to the volunteer fire department or school board that bind other people to their hometowns. Bus people have children who are now old enough to take over their businesses. But otherwise they are footloose. Their best friends are the other bus people they meet again and again on the road during the annual circuit.

At Outdoor Resorts in Indio, most of the sites belong to individual bus owners who have paid up to $200,000 for a 75-ft.-long, 35-ft.-wide lot. (Transients can rent an unoccupied lot for $50 a night.) There is not much privacy, but that's O.K. because bus people tend to be outdoor extroverts. "The difference between us and condo people," says Pallin, "is that at 5 o'clock, condo owners go inside, and we come out for cocktails."

Much of the conversation at such gatherings centers on who has the fanciest new device, a fascination that has earned Indio the nickname Out-do Resorts. "There's a lot of competition over who has the most 'wow,'" says Manuel Ortega, 37, of Riverdale, Calif., whose bus has six TV sets, including one that rises out of the dinette table. This season, however, the biggest wow is elicited by the three or four double slides that have rolled into camp. In this configuration, two compartments, one in the parlor and another in the bedroom, extend outward when the bus is parked. So with the touch of a button the width of the bus swells from 8 ft. to 11 ft. That feature will cost you an additional $300,000 or so--or enough to buy a couple of Ferraris, if you were so inclined.

Indulging whims is an integral part of bus life. Want to go to Las Vegas for a week? Bus people can unplug from Indio's water, sewer and electric lines and be on the road in 15 minutes. Backing up can be tricky, so the $1 million bus is equipped with a videocam in the rear end and a monitor at the driver's seat. On the open highway a bus handles as easily as a big, expensive car. At the end of the day, bus people often turn into an empty mall parking lot to camp. Wide-open Wal-Mart lots are a favorite resting place.

Is there anything disagreeable about the bus life? "Think of living in your hallway, parked in your driveway," poses Patricia Upchurch, a bus person from Whidbey Island, Wash. Most bus people spend at least a couple of months a year back home to stretch out. Occasionally a bus person leaves the life permanently--one dropout became paranoid about the risk of ripping the roof off under an overpass. Some other kinds of motor homes have lost their tops that way, but the record is not clear on whether a bus has. (If one does get stuck under an overpass, the driver can deflate the air-suspension system and lower the coach a few inches.)

Low overpasses aside, the bus life seems well suited to those looking to avoid life's small annoyances. Take highway congestion. Chriss and Myrna Crawford, from Missoula, Mont., were caught in a three-hour traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway several years ago. While the exasperated car drivers around and below them craned their neck and cursed, the Crawfords calmly cooked their dinner. In a generation or two, maybe all of us will take the bus.