The Busload of Books Tour is about to begin. In service of our mission, we’ll be traveling through all fifty states in the year ahead. We’ll visit state parks and national monuments, roadside attractions and hole-in-the wall eateries. From the Black Hills (South...
In Which Our Bus Is Nearly Packed and Our Hearts Are Full of Gratitude
We embark on the Tour one week from today. As I contemplate our pending departure, I alternate between bursts of excitement, fits of panic, and passages of restorative gratitude. Robbi and I have dreamed on this project for more than a decade but never thought we’d be...
In Which Generosity Abounds and Robbi Plans a Return to Her Roots
We're thrilled to announce that we’ll be doing an author/illustrator visit and all-school, hardcover book giveaway at Chestertown’s own HH Garnet Elementary School on April 29th! Garnet was Robbi’s elementary school—and it’s the school Alden and Kato attended, Augie...
New Year’s Eve and Gratitude
As 2021 comes to an end, we want to say thanks to each and every once of you (800+ people, and counting) who've contributed to the Busload of Books Tour. Thanks to you, we’ll be bringing our books and assemblies to 25,000 students and teachers in every US state (and...
Announcing the Telethon
We are pleased to announce the Busload of Books Tour Double Your Dollars 12-Hour Telethon Extravaganza! Join us the Saturday after Thanksgiving from 9am - 9pm ET for an action-packed lineup of hijinks, capers, pageantry, cooking lessons, and extremely special guests....
The Grant That Started It All
Here’s the story of the act of generosity that made the Busload of Books tour possible. One afternoon a few years ago, my phone rang out of the blue. It was our friend DJ calling with an offer that would change our lives. He and his wife Devika wanted to give us a...
Robbi’s Take on the “Why” Behind the Bus Tour
When Matthew and I started out making books together, it was pretty much entirely selfishly motivated. We had an itch to scratch, and we really enjoyed putting his words and my pictures together. It was fun, really, and who doesn't like to have fun? And so we...
How We Got the Idea for the Tour
People have been asking how we got the idea for the Busload of Books tour. Here’s some background. When The Real McCoys came out a few years ago, Robbi and I started getting invited to do author visits at elementary schools. It was the best! We’d do assemblies and...
Busload of Books Tour Promo Video
As you might have already heard, we have a big adventure ahead. So big, that we created this video to tell you all about it and to give you an easy way to share it with friends, your colleagues, your cousin, your other cousin, your hairdresser, your third-grade...
Tour Announcement Recap
IN CASE YOU MISSED LAST NIGHT’S ANNOUNCEMENT, HERE’S THE RECAP: Our family will be spending the 2022-2023 school year traveling the country in a tiny home school bus, visiting Title I elementary schools in all 50 states, doing assemblies on creativity and...
Announcing the Busload of Books Tour!
We (and the kids) are going to spend the 2022-2023 school year on the ultimate road trip— living in a tiny home school bus, visiting Title I elementary schools in all 50 states, doing presentations on creativity and collaboration, and handing out 25,000 free books to...
The Busload of Books Tour is a year-long project to promote literacy and raise awareness of the challenges facing our nation’s public schools.

Author/illustrator duo Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr (that’s us) and our four kids will spend the 2022-2023 school year traveling the country in a school bus/tiny home, visiting Title I schools in all 50 states (plus DC), and giving away 25,000 hardcover books to students and teachers from underserved communities.

As we travel, we will be blogging, vlogging and posting frequently to social media. All of our content will be appropriate for bringing families and students along on our ultimate road trip.
The latest on Instagram:
Good night from Milford State Park in Milford, Kansas, where we were not planning to sleep tonight.
We started the day in Oklahoma and loafed a while before driving north to Tanganyika, an interactive wildlife park in Goddard, Kansas. We fed romaine to giraffes, tortoises, and guinea pigs, little tubs of milky fluid to lorikeets, and craisins to lemurs. We pet kangaroos (who were surprisingly chill). Kato fell in love with the lorikeets and Augie with the guinea pigs. I’m guessing there will be another power point presentation in my future.
Afterward, we drove to Wichita and found a grocery store. The kids stayed in the bus to do their homework, and Robbi and I spent a few minutes strolling the aisles, totally alone except for the other hundred or so people in the store. It was the closest thing we’ve had to a date in a while. We were hungry and probably bought more food than we needed, including an inadvisable box of Peeps-flavored cereal.
Then we drove two hours to our next campsite, a lovely spot on the banks of a lake, where we parked and set up camp only to discover the bathrooms were locked for the “off season.” The “off season” ends in two days, but Robbi couldn’t wait that long. She scowled profoundly by the lakeside as I packed up the bus for departure. She consulted the Google and found a new park an hour down the road.
On this drive, I made a terrible error, opening my driver window at the wrong moment and creating a draft that blew my favorite lei from Hawaii out the window. I despaired, but Robbi did not. We turned around, found my lei, and rejoiced as the sun set.
Then we drove another hour to a new park where we poked around in the dark for a bathroom that worked. The first set of bathrooms we found was also locked, but we persisted and finally found a set with doors that actually opened. More rejoicing transpired.
Now we are parked and Dumbles is getting his frisk on. Robbi is making a salad, and soon we will all pile onto the mattress on the back and watch TV.
It’s good to be back in Kansas, where I lived from sixth grade through the end of high school. Stay tuned for blasts from my past.
#busloadofbooks
Good night from Coon Creek Cove in Newkirk, Oklahoma. Some days we wake up with a clear sense of what’s going to happen and other days we’re utterly surprised as weather shifts or opportunities present themselves.
Today was some of both. We spent much of the day at Olive Elementary, hosted by librarian Barbara Smythe. It’s a day we’ve been anticipating for 18 months, and it was just as fun as we’d hoped. We’ll tell you all about it soon.
What surprised us was what Barbara said as we were leaving. In addition to being a librarian, STEM teacher, and mother of four, she’s a volunteer firefighter and wondered if we might want to tour the fire station on our way out of town.
We nodded enthusiastically and Barbara called the chief to set up a tour. As it turns out, the chief was her husband Tim, who has recently taken over for his dad who had been chief for forty years prior.
Tim couldn’t have been more gracious or warm. He spent almost two hours showing us the various trucks, opening every compartment, demonstrating where the various hoses, ladders, tanks, and tools are stored and how they’re used. He let us sit in the cab, turned on the sirens, and gave us a demo of the heat sensors the firefighters use to find people or animals during a search and rescue.
All of the vehicles are customized to the specific needs of Tim’s community. In addition to two decommissioned military trucks Tim has converted into 2,500-gallon tankers, there’s a fleet of pickups set up to combat brush fires, which are the most common call for the Freedom Hill Station.
Tim showed us the office, the classroom where he runs trainings for firefighters from other towns, and the bank of lockers where the firefighters have their coats, pants, and boots carefully hung and folded for easy access at a moment’s notice.
I’d never known how much goes into setting up and running a fire station. It was incredible to hear someone so knowledgeable walk us through how everything works. Thank goodness there are people like Tim and Barbara willing to devote so much time and energy for the good of their communities. It was an honor to meet them both today.
#busloadofbooks