An overnight stop on a technicolored school bus was all it took to get noticed in Live Oak for one group of modern day hippies camping out in the local Wal-Mart parking lot Monday. But don't let the unkempt hair and dirty fingernails fool you.
The clan of five guys -- Ned Resnikoff, 19, Max Warman, 19, Peter Hilldebrand, 20, Tycho Williams, 20, and John Paganetti, 22 -- are all college students from Middletown, Conn. who are making their way across the country on vegetable oil and a whim. The group was hoping to find a new fuel pump in Live Oak for to their bus' fuel system in order to continue their journey.
The five attended Middletown High School together and are simply enjoying their summer before returning to college in the fall.
"There's really no plan or rhyme or reason to it," Williams said. The group hopes to meet Gary Oldman, the actor who played Lt. James Gordon in the film The Dark Knight, but had no real explanation as to why that meeting would be so important.
Williams and Paganetti attend the University of Connecticut; Hilldebrand, Eastern Connecticut State University; Resnikoff, City College of New York; and Warman, Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
"Conversations on this bus are a lot of fun," Hilldebrand said.
Although the group has only traveled for three weeks, the idea for the road trip has been in the works for nearly four years. They purchased the school bus on eBay for $1,800, and traveled from Middletown to Dexter, Minn. by Greyhound to retrieve it. They said they held a spray painting party to decorate the bus, named it "Anne Marie" after a Grateful Dead song, and it took nearly a year and a half to construct a fuel system that runs on vegetable oil. The makeshift system holds about 100 gallons of vegetable and gets about 10 miles to the gallon.
"We've been fortunate that we have friends in certain parts of the county," Williams said. The group has often gone without showering for weeks, he said, but they don't seem to mind much. Williams said they've depended on the generosity of restaurants to provide used cooking oil, which they then filter to fuel their bus.
The group has made stops in Washington, DC.; Charlottetown, Virginia; and Charlotte, North Carolina. Now they’re headed to New Orleans for the 4th of July, Williams said. At some point they hope to spend a week or so attempting to cross the state of Texas. The road trip will culminate on the west coast.
"We're excited to visit California and the Bay area because most of us haven't been there before," Williams said.
Local News
<font color="#0033CC">FEATURE:</font> 5 guys, one bus, plenty of stops along the way
Connecticut college students visit Live Oak in their vegetable oil-powered Blue Bird
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