The Lost Bus: 3 friends travel in refurbished bus offering services to communities in need

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – Hop aboard a refurbished school bus and you’ll find a friend group who spent their last year traveling the country while making an impact on countless communities.

The bus belongs to Davis Linscott, Josh Haddad, and Cain Compton. They all met at Clemson, and after graduating spent the last year living out of a renovated bus traveling around the United States.

“We bought this school bus, just a regular stock school bus back in January of 2022, and just got it on an online auction,” Compton explained.

But before they could travel around the country, they had to make upgrades to the bus. After nine months of work, the trio was now ready to start their year of travel.

“We started in South Carolina, and we pretty much did a big clockwise loop around the country,” said Compton. “We hit Florida first and then we moved west.”

You may be asking yourself why would three guys pile into a school bus and travel the U.S. for a year? Well, their reason is found in the title of their bus: The Lost Bus.

“LOST is an acronym for Lending Our Services Traveling, and essentially we go to different communities, different towns, each week and seeing how we can help,” said Haddad. “Sometimes that’s helping out after a natural disaster, sometimes it’s partnering with local non-profits or churches or sometimes it’s just helping out a family or people in need.”

For the last year, every few weeks a big blue school bus rolled into a different town or city across the Nation with one goal in mind – to help.

“We had like a series of two or three weeks where we were like building chicken coops on two separate occasions within those two or three weeks,” said Linscott. “Both of the times were like really impactful, and those people really wanted this chicken coop. And we like brought a woman to tears because we made a chicken coup for her.”

“Right when we finished the bus in October, was the same time that Hurricane Ian had just hit Florida, and so the timing worked out that they needed hands to help out,” said Haddad, adding: “And so we were able to straight down to Florida and help out there for a few weeks and really fill the need.”

For nothing in return, they offered their services – and now a trial of their impact can be found on the ceiling of their bus which includes the name of the people who have been helped by the Lost Bus.

“I was blown away by how much I could get to know somebody in just a week just because we were serving next to each other,” Linscott said.

“There’s good people everywhere- it doesn’t matter where you go, there’s good people, doing amazing things in every corner of this country,” added Compton.

Josh, Davis, and Cain said their story with the Lost Bus ends there, but they are looking for a new group to take over the bus and start a new journey of lending services while traveling. They are asking anyone interested to reach out.