The satellite-equipped rockstar tour bus of Critical Path founder and geek’s geek Wayne Correia is the subject of this San Francisco Chronicle article. He (and his bus) saved my ass once in Black Rock City. I rode around with 30 pounds of gear on a young girl’s banana-seat Huffy bike, all day long in burning heat and whiteout dust storms, all over the desert, looking for a functional satellite connection to file an audio report on Burning Man for NPR. My skin was sunburned, my butt was aching, and I was as dehydrated as an overdone tofurkey. And then, when I’d all but given up — I stumbled on Mr. Correia. He said “Hey, I know your face from Friendster!” — and opened the door to a bus filled with nerd hotties and unwired bandwidth.
The bus cannot be described as “regular.” It’s a luxury cruiser of an ungainly vintage — 1992, to be exact — and is rumored to have belonged to Don Mattingly of the New York Yankees. The carpet is teal, with an ivory dolphin carved into the weave. (To be fair, Wayne swears he’s about to tear out the carpet because, he says, it’s “silly.”) The wall lights are a peculiar construction of brass and graduated glass rods that would fit on a set for “The Sopranos.” Gilt-edged cocktail glasses nest in the glass cupboards. In the front of the bus are gray leather captain’s chairs on swivels. In the back is a bedroom lined with mirrored cabinets.
Wayne, who intends to install solar panels on the roof, somewhere near the satellite uplink for his computer, bought the bus on eBay for the bargain price of $200,000 in cash. He says that as he drove it from Chicago, where he purchased it, to the Bay Area, he had a revelation: “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I’m a bus driver! My grandfather was a bus driver in L.A.for 40 years. He got up at 5 am every day. And now I’m a bus driver, too!'”