The Bus
A few years after graduating from the University of Florida we began to notice the natural decline in football game attendance one would expect as real life issues began to creep their way into our inner circle of friend’s lives. Weddings, babies, jobs, and mortgages took their toll on attendance at our normal tailgates both at home and away venues. The number of attendees on trips to Auburn, Knoxville, Baton Rouge, Jacksonville and other SEC destinations that once required multiple rental vans were now barely filling company cars. Life had imposed its will on our football weekends and neutered many of our friends, but we refused to stand by and let it happen year after year.
We decided we needed something to bring back the excitement; something to draw our friends back out of their office cubicles on the weekends; something to make cutting the grass and other trivial weekend chores jobs to be done during the week. In short, we were at a point where we either had to either give up the whole game day scene as we knew it, or we had to bring it back and make it better than ever. Although Gainesville provides the best game day bar scene in the country with 10-12 co-ed filled watering holes directly across the street from the Stadium, we had to figure out a way to have an oasis of our own; a place to start before the start; a place to "get ready to get ready" and a place to end the nights after the nights ended. We also needed a way to take our show on the road so that our game day "home base" would be with us wherever we went.
Hence, the Bus. We had discussed the idea a few times before actually acting on it. Xynidis and I had jokingly mentioned the idea and with one phone call, the idea came to fruition. A local beer distributor in Daytona had a 30 year Bluebird school bus that they were willing to part with for
next to nothing. It was perfect. We contacted the inner circle and put out the initial public offering of ownership. The total cost of getting the bus painted, having body work done, and a few mechanical issues addressed was divided among a handful of guys and the Gatorbus was born.
Word spread and a website was developed. The first few tailgates had 30 to 40 people and that number quickly grew into the hundreds. Each member of the ownership group was delegated a specific task from audio-video chairman to beverage chairmen to food chairmen. As game day arrived each Saturday faces from the past that had not been seen since graduation parties years ago began arriving. Crawling back out of their life induced stupors, these perennial absentees congregated around the Bus. It was truly the beacon of light in the storm of life that had almost claimed them all. They were back, game day was back, and tailgating hasn’t been the same since.
I can tell you that we’ve been to every SEC town. We’ve seen tailgating done well and done poorly. On a wholesale scale we have seen the best and the worst. We know that collectively it is hard to beat a place like Auburn, for example, when it comes to tailgating, but at the same time there is no one individual tailgate to rival ours.
The funny thing is, people look at the bus and say, "Why didn’t you get something nicer?" or "My uncle has a nicer motor home than this." They are missing the point. Anybody can go buy the nicest top of the line motorcoach.
Anybody can purchase the biggest production TV around and watch football games on it. We will all be 60 years old one day and want to enjoy those same conveniences of nicer motorhomes. We could have done the same thing now. But we have what can’t be purchased. We have people leaving their $100,000 tailgate spots to get what we’ve got.
In the last two years, the Bus has even accrued a few imposters around town on game days. Groups of guys have purchased their own school buses. Some of them have nicer paint jobs, better stereos, etc. People ask us if that makes us mad or jealous; of course not. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. We applaud their efforts as we sit comfortably back in our ten dollar lawn chairs and listen to our band play, eat, drink, socialize and watch the members of their tailgates slowly matriculate to ours, and try blend in like the rest of them.
