So You Owned a VW Bus – Details, episodes & analysis

Take one last ride with us as we take questions from our listeners and past interviewees in the series finale. 

Does a bus need a name? How did our bus, Adie, get her name? Can you rename a bus? We get to all those questions and more in this episode. 

Oh, the Sullivans! We love these people. Jarah is the daughter of Emma and Shawn Sullivan, our friends and podcast syndicators at Happy Productions. Jarah is super cool and is carrying on the family legacy in more than one way. You should check out her band, Dellwood, and definitely listen to her radio show Linnertime, which airs on Happy Productions from 2-6 p.m. Monday-Friday. 

Jesse "VW" Marshall is back for a third episode. We chewed the fat and then Jesse boiled it down into and put it into his Vanagon. He has his own method for making biofuel and walks us through his process. 

Colin Kellogg of Itinerant Air-cooled fame has logged more miles on the road than most humans. When you live on the road full-time in your VW bus, you sometimes bed down in strange places and make friends (and enemies) out of your nighttime visitors. 

VW people are by nature obsessive people. Maybe obsessive isn’t the right word. We are driven, passionate, and—well, obsessive, might be the right word. Oftentimes, we have interviews where our VW bus owner reveals they have another passion. Perhaps the best example of this is Birding By Bus. Marc and Eliana are professional birders who had so many stories to tell, we thought it was only right we bring them back for a detour episode that focuses on birding. And this detour might hold the record for our farthest fetched episode: they will take us all the way to Attu, the most remote island in the United States. 

Tim from Tok. Is there any other way we could cap off this season than with our Alaskan road savior? We were in sorry shape when we were towed into Tok. And we were complete strangers to Tim, yet he and his wife Maria were welcoming. They shared their time, expertise, food, and wisdom with us while Miracle recuperated from her long-standing injury and the bus was repaired. Before we got back on the road, Tim was gracious enough to share his memories of coming to Alaska and finding his split window bus. He weaves in his philosophy and also outlines the laws of the land here in the far north. 

Zach Wallace has just about the coolest fleet of vehicles in all of Alaska—a squad of Vangons, including a Syncro. Luckily for those who travel north to Anchorage, he rents them out. Last Frontier Westys has been in business for only a couple years, but his love for VWs has been around for, well, generations. 

You’ve probably heard of Birding By Bus—the personal endeavor by birders Marc and Eliana that turned into a world-traveling business. We had a chance to catch up with these two in Wasilla, Alaska, and hear all about the start of Birding by Bus and how it became an online sensation. And, if you’re anything like me (a real dunce when it comes to our avian friends), you’ll probably learn quite a bit. 

Jeremiah Woods is the owner and operator of a bed and bus-fest called Camping in the Woods. Each rental unit is a decked out VW bus themed around a movie or an idea. Located in Golden, British Columbia, the scenery is stunning. It’s no wonder Jeremiah was able to secure a sizable check from the Canadian version of Shark Tank called Dragon’s Den.