When I bought my double-decker bus in November 1990, I had no idea that I would drive it around the world or perform for the Sultan of Brunei and the street children of Calcutta, i.e., the richest and the poorest of the world!

My name is Scott Harrison, and I grew up in Bath, England. I suppose I got the idea of living in a vehicle while I was in Australia as a young man on a working holiday visa back in the late 1980s. My $1,000 six-cylinder Valiant panel van took me all over the country, and I enjoyed my rent-free existence.

In Central America, I found myself living in an old American school bus with a load of friends touring Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. By the time I got back to Britain, I was convinced that the only way to live was in a mobile vehicle rather than a house. In the late 80s, I bought a Bedford Duple coach for £700. I made a couple of beds by turning the seats around, bought a gas cooker with a fearsome grill to make piping hot toast, and added a sink in the kitchen area.

Back in those days, of course, the most essential thing in a living vehicle was the stereo speaker system for the road ahead and an entire case of cassettes!!! I didn’t even paint it before setting off to drive it all over Europe. We visited Circuses and Juggling conventions in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, and Gibraltar. We made money by collecting free items from the side of the road or from skips and selling them at markets.

Anything we could fit in the boot of our Bedford Duple bus could potentially be sold somewhere. This included finding an incredible skip used by the Louvre Museum in Paris, containing scratched chairs, smudged mirrors, and a fascinating array of slightly damaged yet very sellable items. The boot collapsed while driving down the Champs-Élysées, but we were able to fix it with the help of a local garage.

We witnessed the two-hundred-year celebrations of Bastille Day and then headed to Amsterdam to live on an island with over 3,000 travelers and hundreds of vehicles. In 1990, I purchased 4386 LJ, a 1962 Bristol Ledecka double-decker bus that had spent twenty-five years in service with the Bournemouth Bus Company.

Years later, a friend of mine asked me if I could find the three lucky sevens in the registration number plate. I’d certainly never thought about it when I bought the bus with 250 ten-pound notes, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. My brother Roger held my hand as I made this huge decision and told me I was getting a lot for my money. I never realized just how much faithful service I would get from a bus that had already logged well over two million miles!

The first thing to do was to remove many of the 60 passenger seats. If you hold a British car driver's license, you can still drive a much heavier vehicle, provided it is your home vehicle. To make it your home, you need a sink, a cook stove, and a bed. With this in mind, I began slowly converting the bus, but it wasn’t until years later that a more intensive interior redecoration really began.

I drove it to Verona in Italy for the 1991 European Juggling Convention, and then on to Berlin, where I parked it in the newly liberated East Berlin sector and flew Aeroflot with a group of two hundred and fifty other jugglers to Tbilisi in Georgia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, for a spectacular circus convention.

In 1992, I formed Captain Bob’s Circus by occupying property in Bath that had previously been owned by the late Robert Maxwell. It was here that I met my girlfriend, Isabelle, and in June 1996, our son, Theo, was born in Toulouse, France. We performed all over Europe together.

The idea of busking our way to Australia by bus seemed the next obvious challenge! It was indeed a challenge, with our Gardner 6LW engine breaking down for five months in Malaysia and requiring a complete rebuild, and Theo and I both suffering from malaria in Calcutta, as well as numerous near misses with speeding buses in India.

We also had to deal with the cost of a Carnet de Passage, essentially a passport for the bus, as well as the expenses of shipping a vehicle as ocean freight. It took us four years to busk our way to Australia, performing hundreds of shows in the street, theaters, festivals, embassies, and schools.

We were deported from Australia after seven months for busking on our tourist visas despite having given a free show for the Australian High Commission in Pakistan en route. Fortunately, the New Zealand government granted us year-long working visas, and our son, Theo, a student visa, allowing him to attend three different schools.

Theo, then nearly seven years old, began learning Spanish in Valparaiso, Chile, and by the time we entered Mexico, four years later, he spoke the language fluently. Children are much more adaptable than adults when learning a new language.  

During our 12-year world tour, we performed our circus comedy show thousands of times to finance our adventure. We never planned very far ahead, and we enjoy every day on the road.

We now call the bus “Il Nonno” (the grandfather in Italian). The bus, now 63 years old, has covered over three million miles in more than fifty countries and has a top speed of 33 miles per hour.  It was designed as a city bus, not a highway bus, so high speed was never a design factor.

Over the last four years, The Sprockets have been developing a Circus retreat called Sprocketlandia. Sprocketlandia is a community-focused, rustic living and learning space located in the countryside near Frigole in the heel of Italy (near Lecce). It offers unique rural holiday-home accommodations with private terraces, gardens, and proximity to sandy beaches. It focuses on community, circus skills, and eco-conscious living.

The Sprockets have a bespoke program of Circus training, with a particular emphasis on aerial silks and acro yoga, drawing on their extensive performance experience. All levels and all ages are welcome. One of my songs, “My Cuban Friend,” is available on Spotify.

Happy travels, The Sprockets.

To watch a video of our shows and travels, click here. https://youtu.be/j9lP2WzsTDs