Welcome to Roaming on Rubber – a school bus conversion and travel blog!
Who are we?
My name is Claire, and I make up one half of the pair known as Roaming On Rubber. My partner and high school sweetheart Shane, fills the other half. After many years apart, we have reunited for an exciting journey; to turn not one, but two buses into motorhomes, and roam the roads of Australia where we live with our cats. Yes, we travel with 3 cats! We have been filming and documenting our bus conversions and travels as we go.
So how did we get to where we are?
Our love for travel started in August 2017, when we took our first holiday together to Japan. It opened our eyes to the world that was out there. Our zest and passion for travel were ignited and we were no longer happy or content with where we were. Within a week of returning home we had booked two more trips away; Bali and China. It still wasn’t enough.
After thinking seriously about what we wanted from life, we decided that we could not stay still. We wanted to see everything there was, and experience all life had to offer. Australia, where we live, was the perfect place to start. It has so much to offer and we want to see everything.
Shane and I started looking into the option of a motor home or a caravan; a way to get on the road and travel full time.
After researching our options, we jumped at the decision to buy and do a school bus conversion and take our lives on the road. We chose a Toyota Coaster school bus to turn into our home for as long as we decided to travel around Australia.
It took us 16 long and hard months to build our home in our Coaster, and we lived and travelled in it for a year and a half. During this time we were lucky enough to be invited to showcase our bus at the Tiny House Festival in Bendigo, where we got the chance to meet so many other like minded people.
We drove the winding hills of the Great Ocean Road, the long and straight Nullarbor, saw the beaches at sunset on the West Coast and made it all the way back East.
When Covid hit in March 2020, we were in Melbourne and had to rush back home to Newcastle before the borders closed. We had 2 days.
By this stage we had lived in our Coaster for 18 months and we decided there were a few changes to be made. After thinking long and hard we decided it was the perfect time to knuckle down, sell the Coaster and upgrade to something slightly bigger.
Come June, we welcomed our 33 seat Mercedes Vario into our world, and shortly thereafter said farewell to our beloved Coaster.
Our Mercedes Vario build was a little different to our Coaster. With so many restrictions and lockdowns in place, it took us until December 2021 to finish and finally move in. Since then it has been a rocky road, but at least we are in our new home!
Living in a bus on the road means we have the best chance to go where we want and not be restricted by time or work.
Now when we started we had absolutely no experience in this kind of thing at all! It took a lot of research, a lot of trial and error and a lot of learning to get to the end of both our builds.
We wanted to start a bus conversion blog to be able to track our progress towards our goal of location independence and to chronicle all our adventures with our bus conversions. We hope that in doing this, we may be able to make things just a little easier for anyone hoping to embark on a similar adventure, as well as be able to experience life as it should be for us; relaxing, stress free and fulfilling.
This is a huge personal journey for both of us and there are so many ups and downs, but we want to be able to share it with you.
