Kara and Nate stood in a school parking lot in Colorado, staring up at a yellow American school bus they had just bought sight-unseen from a government auction website, with a check engine light already glowing and a small trail of smoke drifting from the exhaust. If you have ever wondered what it looks like to commit fully to a ridiculous idea, this was it. The Mongol Rally, billed as the most absurd road trip on Earth, demands that teams cross continents in the most impractical vehicle possible, and for a nine-person crew, a tiny car was never going to cut it. What followed was five months of mechanical near-disasters, a trans-Atlantic shipping saga, customs confusion in Germany, and a yellow school bus becoming the most photographed vehicle on the autobahn.
How you accidentally buy the wrong bus first
The original bus they toured was love at first sight, right up until they discovered it weighed almost 30,000 pounds, a figure that would have required a commercial license nearly impossible to obtain outside Europe. Back to the drawing board. Nate found a second bus on a government auction site, lighter and just small enough to be legal. What followed was a real-time bidding war that stretched over hours, with two rival bidders trading increments back and forth. With 60 seconds left, a third bidder appeared. Nate pushed his ceiling to $4,000. The timer hit zero. The website just read ‘CLOSED’ with no fanfare. ‘That’s so like the government,’ someone said into the silence.
When they finally picked up the bus, the previous owner, whose wife had driven it for four years before retiring, walked them through a hood full of rust patches, an air-ride compressor that ran constantly, and an oil leak. It had not started that morning. ‘I thought he was just going to be like, you bought it off the website, good luck,’ Nate said. A family named the Naws later fixed the compressor, installed two new batteries, and painted the side while Kara and Nate were traveling in Argentina.
Getting it from Colorado to a cargo ship in Baltimore
The route across the US came down to a coin flip, literally. With only a Japanese yen on hand, they called heads for I-80 through Nebraska and tails for I-70 through Kansas. It landed on flowers. Kansas it was. Four days, roughly 1,800 miles, a snowstorm over an 11,000-foot mountain pass, a mysterious sensor on the rear emergency exit that killed the ignition overnight in a Kansas parking lot, and a stop to surprise Nate’s nieces and nephew in Louisville. The bus weighed in at a final 9,580 pounds at a truck stop scale outside Baltimore, a detail the freight company needed before it could go anywhere near a cargo ship.
They decorated the interior with stick-on party lights in the final twenty minutes before drop-off, the roof deck plan having been quietly abandoned and the foam boat-decking returned to Amazon. Then they left the bus in a lot next to a burgundy freight liner and flew to Australia.
That moment at the port in Germany
Three days of customs confusion in Hamburg followed, involving a mixup that had classified the bus as a permanent import rather than a temporary transit vehicle. Nate walked out of the port office having paid nothing, still unsure exactly what had been resolved. The bus started on the first try.
On the autobahn, trucks slowed and drivers leaned out. At a grocery store outside Prague, a father walked over and asked if his son could look inside. ‘He’s welcome to look inside,’ Nate said. The boy had seen school buses before, he explained, on a trip to the United States.
The party lights, still blinking in a Czech Republic hotel parking lot
A set of color-changing LED strips, pressed to the interior ceiling of a used American school bus, remote control tucked into the overhead compartment, sitting alone in a front yard outside a small hotel near Prague at one in the morning.
By the time the bus reached the start line, the crew had covered 2,500 miles just to get there. ‘Had we known all the prep, all the money, the logistics,’ Kara said, trailing off. Nate finished it: ‘We’re here.’ The rally, and everything after it, was already waiting.
