Meeting The Green Tortoise

I had a place to stay among friends in Eugene, Oregon. Meanwhile, I was stuck in the freakshow of Berkeley, so I desperately wanted to head north. I'd heard about a bus called The Green Tortoise from an old college friend who sometimes drove for them, so I looked them up and booked a seat. The next evening I pulled out of Berkeley on an ancient motor coach headed northward toward Seattle.

The Tortoise's San Francisco stop at the corner of First & Natoma
San Francisco, CA

After getting over my initial reservations I realized that the Tortoise was an amazing thing; a very comfortable and friendly way to travel and have fun with a bunch of people you've never met before. After spending the night aboard the bus, cooking breakfast by a river and taking a dawn swim, I decided that this was the way I wanted to travel.

Once in Eugene I arranged to meet the owner of the Tortoise to see if I could get a job with them. Not as a driver (since I had no bus license) but as a laborer. I worked in a warehouse/maintenance facility in Lowell, Oregon outside of Eugene for about a month, and then transferred to the home office in San Francisco. There I got to practice driving motor coaches around the neighborhood and eventually traded driving lessons for a week of hanging posters in small towns between San Francisco, CA and Eugene, OR. For a week I slept in a VW Rabbit with the passenger's seat removed — not an easy task when you're 6'4".

I got my bus license in December of 1987. From there, my travels began in earnest . . .