These longtime Tahoe friends are following the World Cup in a souped-up school bus

It's the middle of May and a retired school bus is parked in the dirt in Truckee's Sierra Meadows neighborhood under a grove of pines. Orange Home Depot buckets, a portable work bench and a saw are set up in front. Inside, a drill buzzes. Afrobeats play on a speaker. Gone are the row seats. In their place will be bunk beds, bench seats and a kitchen. On the roof, Tahoe-based photographer Ryan Salm crouches low, next to a can of grayish-blue paint, where he's covering up the last of the school bus yellow. Eventually, a giant mural will wrap around the bus's exterior: Mountains, ocean, a city skyline, a screeching eagle grabbing a soccer ball, and the words: "Home Team."

"Make yourself at home," Salm says, climbing down a ladder with a paint brush in hand, as friend and fellow traveler Rylan Cordova steps around the corner, covered in dust, an N-95 mask hung around his neck. Cordova gives me a tour of the bus, describing plans to turn it into a sort of hostel on wheels that will travel hundreds of miles up and down the West Coast during this summer's World Cup.

Salm and Cordova are part of a collective of Tahoe musicians, adventurers, travelers and soccer fans who have chased the World Cup all over the globe. They call themselves the Home Team String Band. Everywhere they go, they bring instruments, including a banjo fashioned to look like a soccer ball, and custom matching track suits, their "sweatsedos."

In 2010, they roadtripped across South Africa in a tiny Volkswagen rental car. In 2014, they followed the U.S. men's soccer team all over Brazil, at one point riding a dugout canoe in the Amazon. The U.S. team didn't qualify for the World Cup in Russia in 2018, but the Home Team String Band still made it, playing tunes in St. Petersburg, Moscow and all along the Trans-Siberian Railway. In Qatar in 2022, they rode collapsible bikes through the capital city, Doha.

Now, as the World Cup arrives in America, Tahoe's Home Team String Band has reassembled with a bus. They want to give back the same hospitality they've experienced abroad, but to do so, they'll have to navigate American car culture, dynamic pricing and a politics that's imposed travel restrictions or bans on fans from more than a quarter of the countries participating in the tournament. This might well be their most challenging World Cup adventure yet.

The Home Team String Band is undaunted. They're setting an example for anyone who wants to experience the revelry around the World Cup - whether you can afford a ticket to a stadium game or you're watching a game on a TV with your neighbors. The band members paint their faces red, white and blue and cheer for the American team, but before and after the games, they say it doesn't matter who wins or loses, who is the home team or who is visiting. They're out celebrating in stadium parking lots or small towns, shoulder-to-shoulder with locals and soccer fans from around the world. The World Cup is more than a sporting event. It's a bridge between cultures and travelers. It's about camaraderie and memorable experiences on the road. That's the ethos behind their name, Home Team String Band.

"There's nowhere else that you get the whole world together for a single thing," Salm says about the most-watched sporting event on Earth, the World Cup. He's sitting on a sun-drenched stump of a tree, outside the bus, while his longtime friend and fellow musician Dane Halter from Houston, Texas, strums a few chords on his guitar nearby.

'Soccer hooligan adventurers'

In 2010, Salm was mid-way through a six-month odyssey across the African continent when he arrived in Mozambique and met up with Paul Raymore, a friend and former colleague from his days working at Tahoe's newspaper, the Sierra Sun. They took a bus to South Africa, where they met up with another friend from Tahoe, Dan Hurley, a school teacher, and rented a small Volkswagen rental car.

The three of them set off on a road trip to see South Africa's wonders and as many soccer games as they could. Along the way, they played music with a guitar and a harmonica, busking in the stadium parking lots before and after the games.

Raymore was already a big soccer fan: In 1994, the last time the World Cup was in the United States, he tagged along with an older friend to see the U.S. play Brazil at Stanford (the U.S. lost, 1-0, and Brazil went on to win the whole thing, defeating Italy in a penalty shootout at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena). He was also in France during the 1998 World Cup. The night France won their first title, Raymore was in Biarritz, a Basque town on the Atlantic Coast: "The whole town just went nuts. We didn't sleep at all that night. People were climbing flagpoles and light poles and just waving flags," Raymore said.

In South Africa, tickets to games were relatively easy to get, Raymore remembers. That year, Spain won its first title, defeating the Netherlands. The original members of the Home Team String Band saw at least seven games in stadiums, but it was the small bars that they drove to, in South African townships, that made the biggest impression: watching football, drinking beers, playing music.

"All of a sudden, there will be a crazy jam going on at a gas station restaurant that happened to have a TV, that we happened to pull off on the side of the road for," Raymore said. "That is what really cemented the love of the World Cup trip, for me at least. Those kinds of experiences that you would never have otherwise if it wasn't for the shared passion of the World Cup."

What started as a group of three quickly became more. Standing outside of a stadium after a USA game, Salm, Raymore and Hurley randomly crossed paths with another Tahoe local, Pete Blanchard. They offered him the fourth seat in their car and continued onward.

Then, at a hostel in Pretoria, the group met Trevor Husted, a guide and freelance writer who wound up moving to Tahoe after that South Africa trip, thanks in large part to the friendships he'd made with Salm, Raymore, Hurley and Blanchard. "I latched onto them and then we went and had a crazy time," Husted said.

South Africa set the template for how to do a World Cup trip: Soccer, music, the outdoors and a spontaneous, open-to-whatever travel ethos are all key components. "We all knew we wanted to do it again," Raymore said.

The next World Cup was in Brazil in 2014. The Home Team String Band - "soccer hooligan adventurers," as Salm put it in a recent travel article he penned - swelled to seven. Cordova, then a bartender in Tahoe City, joined. So did Tahoe resident Martin Cavada, who brought a cajon, a box-shaped drum, to add to the mix. Another new addition was Kurt Beckering, who had a banjo. In Brazil, Beckering took a sharpie and drew a soccer ball around the pot.

"That became our calling card, the soccer ball banjo," Salm said.

Brazil was also where the velour track suits became their signature look. They followed the U.S. team to stadiums across Brazil, starting in Rio de Janeiro, traveling up the coast and eventually to the Amazon. On the road, every time a game was playing - morning, noon and night - the group pulled over and stopped wherever they were and found a TV playing the game. "Often that was some tiny little roadside gas station or we'd drive into some little enclave," Raymore said.

In those tiny towns in the Amazon, music would happen naturally and freely, before and after the games. Salm calls them a "jovial street band." Their music is a lot of improvisation, light-hearted and free-flowing jams with guitar riffs. Some of the band's members write their own music, but they also play recognizable covers.

"We're playing restaurants, we're playing boats, we're playing to one person on the street," Salm said. "If we see someone we'll just walk up to them. We're more like a band for the people."

In 2018, they traveled to Russia, where France defeated Croatia to win their second World Cup tournament. The band traveled by train to stadiums in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kazan, a riverfront city that ended up being their favorite. They decided to keep going, riding the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way to Lake Baikal, a huge lake near the border of Mongolia that shares much in common with Lake Tahoe.

They passed the time with music: playing in the bar car, in the aisles, in train stations. "Everywhere we played in Russia, they all wanted to hear 'Wind of Change,' by the Scorpions," Salm said. Russian generals lined vodka shots up on the bar for them. Blanchard almost got married - he bought a woman flowers and she proposed. When they reached Lake Baikal, they embarked on a multi-day paddleboarding trip.

In Qatar, in 2022, the group grew bigger still. "Qatar has no booze so we were trying to find a way to make it fun," Salm said. "So we brought foldable bikes and instruments."

That year, Argentina took home the World Cup title after a nail-biter against France. Meanwhile, the Home Team String Band traveled on a budget, avoiding fancy and expensive hotels, choosing instead to stay on the outskirts of the city, near where immigrant laborers lived.

Locals in Doha pulled out their phones to take videos of the Americans strumming guitars and banjos on the subway. They were not at all accustomed to a group of Americans playing music in public spaces. "Everyone was grabbing their friends and calling their neighbors," Salm said.

"We were out in front of this Turkish restaurant one night," said Halter, Salm's friend from college who joined the group in Qatar for the first time. "And we started a jam session and all these people, I would say most of them were immigrant workers, just joined around us, started clapping and having a blast, and we were like, 'This is what it's all about.'"

They also took a five-day detour to paddleboard around the Strait of Hormuz, exploring desert fjords from the water years before it turned into a geopolitical hot zone.

'It's a one world kind of moment'

By late afternoon almost everyone on the Home Team String Band had showed up to pitch in on the bus retrofit: installing cabinetry, building a frame around a ceiling vent. A white board propped up on the dash shows a list of things to do: finish the seat belts, flooring, electric wiring.

They need to decide how they want to represent America, on the eve of the country's 250th anniversary and in a divisive political climate. Salm calls everyone up to huddle and discuss the mural that's going to be painted on the outside of the bus. He's already talked to an artist, they just need to decide what to paint.

"The back should be America," someone says.

"What if it was more like a band tour sort of thing," another says.

"We can also do the soccer ball sun, rising up and then having an eagle grabbing it - just like, f-king America," a third person adds.

The mural is a message they hope will resonate with fellow drivers on America's highways, as they drive up and down the West Coast to see games in the group stage.

The idea to buy a school bus initially surfaced in Qatar. "We've had such hospitality from people around the world at the World Cup, and now that it's here in our home country, we want to provide a taste of that to the visiting fans," Raymore said.

Last fall, they found a "bus guy" who lived in Oregon, Cordova told me as he was giving me the grand tour. They purchased the bus and drove it home, but it broke down about 60 miles outside of Reno. Ever since, the group has been fixing it up: an oil leak needed addressing, the water pump needed to be replaced.

Those are the sorts of details that are straightforward. Other aspects of this upcoming World Cup are out of their control: dynamic pricing, bad press, travel bans preventing fans - even an official referee - from attending.

But if there's a will, there's a way. The members of the Home Team String Band have tons of advice for people who are disenchanted with the negative press and politics surrounding the World Cup.

For starters: "Stop reading the headlines and go to the game," Salm says.

If you haven't found a ticket or can't afford one, go to a neighborhood with people who are from the different countries that are playing. Go to a bar with World Cup paraphernalia out front. Go to the fan fests set up at the stadiums. Find a huge TV and watch it with your friends, neighbors, community members.

"It's not all about being in the stadium," Salm says, adding: "The World Cup is in America and it might not be again in your lifetime, so bring your kids and go check it out."

The World Cup kicks off this weekend. On Thursday, the Home Team String Band is driving the bus to Kings Beach, in North Lake Tahoe, for a fundraiser for the local youth sports league. On Friday, they're hosting a kick-off party for the USA vs. Paraguay game at Alibi Ale Works in Truckee.

Then, on Saturday, they hit the road, stopping in Nevada City for a watch party before going to the Bay Area on Sunday, where they plan to host a party and play music. From there, they're driving up Interstate 5 to Seattle, Vancouver, and then back down to Los Angeles for the United States' game against Turkey on June 25.

Anyone can find them and join them: They'll be posting updates on their website and Instagram page.

"Billions of people are going to watch this," Salm says, on that sunshine-filled day in May, as the team builds out the bus behind him. "Before the game, after the game, it's a one world kind of moment."

At the end of the group stage, the band is parking the bus at the High Sierra Music Festival, where they plan to watch the tournament continue.

Music, the band hopes, will continue to be a door-opener like it was in South Africa, Brazil, Russia and Qatar - leading the group to new experiences and people.

"Whoever wants to jam some tunes with us, whoever wants to drink some beers with us, whoever wants to celebrate football with us, we're open to it," Raymore says.

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This story was originally published June 11, 2026 at 3:44 PM.