As an industry, we know that travel has the power to unite people and create strong bonds.
This universal truth became a reality for three women from the US’s Southwest region in a way they never would have imagined.
It all began in December last year 21-year-old Morgan Tabor, who lives in Boise, noticed her boyfriend was receiving flirty comments on his social posts and was texting several other women, according to The Washington Post.
She looked up one of the girls on Instagram, only to find that almost all of her photos were with the man Tabor had been seeing for several years.
Tabor contacted her boyfriend’s other girlfriend, who was equally shocked. The two dug deeper and more and more girlfriends kept popping up.
One of whom, 19-year-old Abi Roberts, said she had been seeing the man since Halloween.
“This guy had literally slept at my house the night before, kissed me goodbye and said he was driving back to Boise [from Utah] to visit his family,” Roberts told The Washington Post.
It turns out he was actually headed to Tabor’s house just in time for him to catch her FaceTiming with Roberts.
“We were talking, and I suddenly heard his car outside and he came to the door with flowers,” Tabor said.
She said watching his face drop when he saw who she was talking to was “the most cinematic moment ever”.
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The man, who all three women said they didn’t want to name, tried to convince Roberts and Tabor that there was nothing wrong with dating more than one woman at a time, but the two women didn’t agree with his stance.
“After he left, we did some more research,” Roberts said.
“We found at least six women he’d been seeing.”
That’s how they found 18-year-old Bekah King, who said the man was messaging her asking to hang out just two hours after Tabor and Roberts confronted him.
All three women coped with their respective breakups by texting and FaceTiming each other for a few months before deciding to meet for the weekend at Robert’s apartment in Salt Lake City.
The trip saw them become good friends “right away”, and they began planning a road trip together.
“This guy had told each of us that it was his dream to pick up a VW bus and travel around the country in it,” Roberts said.
“We were sitting around laughing and talking about the van life that weekend, and pretty soon we thought, ‘Hey, we can do this.’ ”
Tabor knew someone who was selling an old bus, and since they all had some money saved up, they pooled together their funds and got to work renovating the vehicle.
“We watched a few YouTube videos, but a majority of it was pretty straightforward,” Tabor said.
“Bekah’s dad and my dad helped us with the framing, but beyond that, we built the rest of it.”
They met each weekend to work on the bus until their dream read-trip-mobile came into fruition in June, and they took off on their first escape together to Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains before heading to Jackson and Grand Teton National Park.
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“We take turns driving, and if we’re going downhill and have a good tailwind, we can hit 63 miles an hour,” King said, adding that their project was not a “revenge tour”.
“What this guy did to us doesn’t define our lives.
“We all feel really blessed that we found each other. We’re friends for life.”
The Washington Post managed to get in contact with the ex-boyfriend, who said there were “two sides to everything” and that he thought it was best not to say anything right now, except that he “really didn’t want anything to do with them [the three women] anymore”.
You can follow the trio’s adventures on Instagram.
Featured image source: Instagram/@the.bam.bus
