Preface to the Maiden Voyage or What's in a Name

It's official.  The bus, Jason and I are going to go camping this weekend!  Our plan was to go on our first outing next summer once she's all spiffed up, but now that the motor is running decently we're itchy. Itchy to feel the wind blowing through our hair as we make our way to Vedauwoo at a snail's pace...all the while listening intently for any sound or bump that would indicate our motor isn't as primed for action as we thought.  Sounds like fun right?!  Personally, I can't wait.  (check out the awe inspiring-ness that is Vedauwoo if you're not familiar here)

With our weekend destination set it was time for me to get this baby camp ready.  Over the winter we will be reupholstering, turning our carpet into hardwood and refinishing the wood wall covering...HGTV here we come!  But in the meantime I needed to transform our mess of a bus into something relatively respectable, clean and most importantly, not gross.

Yes, we already cleaned but that was more like degunking, now it was time for the spring cleaning to commence. As much as we'd been getting plenty of praise for our bus while driving it around town, the inside was nothing to write home about.  Ripped cloth, dirty carpet and an even dirtier dashboard and floor mats were what I was up against.

 My tools of choice were a Shop Vac, paper towels, spray and one brand new set of 600 thread count sheets that will be our temporary cushion covers (of course we have to sleep/sit in style).  Oh, and a can of Armor All which I was instructed not to use because that would be the epitome of polishing a turd.  Oh Jason, every girl deserves a facial now and again...of course she will be Armor All'd.

I turned on my Tom Petty station on Pandora (it's become my bus music)  and went to work ripping out fabric, scrubbing like Cinderella and going vacuum crazy on the carpet.  Things even started to look up just after I managed to get all of the fabric out and the cushions vacuumed.

As I was scrubbing the dirt-caked plastic floor mats in the front I was thinking about what we should name her.  We had been pondering it and had even been told by a few different people that it was time for a name.  Jason and I were pretty adamant that she had to come by her name organically and nothing had sounded just right as of yet.  And then it dawned on me as I was silently praising my bus for shining up so nice and getting excited about actually seeing crud free mats...she shines up like a new penny!  It was perfect, as Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles played softly in the background, Penny fits.  That's it!

Luckily my co-bus owner agrees, although he's still not off the polishing a turd bandwagon just yet.  Below our semi-shiny bus with her after-camp-prep clean and a new moniker!