“To our traveling press corps—Happy New Year!” the e-mail read. “For your safety and convenience we will be providing a bus that will begin in Davenport and transport press throughout the swing.”

It was the beginning of 2016, and the traveling Hillary Clinton press corps had finally gotten our bus—a glorious maroon Signature premium people carrier with TVs over every third row and boxed lunches and bottled water piled up on the front couple of rows, and power outlets under all our seats. For many of us, the arrival of the bus—parked on the frozen Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport, Iowa—signified more than an end to speeding tickets and Avis points. We’d finally moved into our very own communal home, like a loft apartment on MTV’s Real World but with wheels. In the outside world, most of us wouldn’t have chosen to spend our time together and certainly not that much time together. But in our shared caravan, we were the Travelers. The bus marked the beginning of us becoming a rowdy, high-strung family forever bound by our bizarre lifestyles, unhealthy diets, and constant search for a power outlet.

The nine or so of us on that first bus trip wanted to mark the moment. We stood on our seats and squatted in the aisle to fit into a group photo. “Say, ‘I’m With Her!’” a young campaign staffer said. “Can you just take the picture?” one reporter replied.

Like all political reporters, I’d devoured Timothy Crouse and Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Ben Cramer and David Foster Wallace’s Up, Simba! (plus glossary), romanticizing the campaign bus beyond all reason. I imagined Great Men, the “heavies” as Crouse called the top rung on the hierarchy of traveling press—Johnny Apple (The New York Times), David Broder (The Washington Post), and Bob Novak (the Chicago Sun-Times)—driving public opinion in between drinking sessions. Their prose had the power to sway primaries and convert other Great Men into presidents, or tear them down until they were also-rans confined to a historical footnote (see Muskie, Edmund). The job had a poetic, renegade feel. Men left their wives and families and their comfortable homes in the suburbs to sleep in a different hotel every night. All in the service of democracy and dick swinging. Add to the political clout free-flowing booze and summer-camp camaraderie, and it was hard to believe that anyone got paid to have that much fun.

But by 2016, so much about the trail had changed. At least back then the “traveling press secretary” actually traveled with the press. This didn’t seem like a radical concept until 2016, when on most days not a single person authorized to speak for the Clinton campaign ever traveled with us. Proximity was power in 2016. The Clinton team preferred instead to ride alongside Hillary in the motorcade or on her private chartered plane. When there was no room on the charter between Iowa City and Ottumwa, one aide sat on the plane’s turned-down toilet seat for the half-hour flight rather than ride in our putrid press quarters. On a typical day, we’d spend 18 hours on the bus only to set eyes on Hillary from the back of a packed gymnasium or as a flash of blonde disappearing behind a van door held open by a bulky Secret Service agent.

I think it was Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s longtime aide and adviser, who said that “by the time women and minorities reach the presidency, the role has been vastly diminished.” Well, call it a slap from the patriarchy or a stroke of bad luck, but by the time women reporters dominated Hillary’s press corps, Twitter and live-streaming and a (female) candidate who had zero interest in having a relationship with the press vastly diminished the campaign bus’s place in the media ecosystem. My colleagues at The New York Times, and reporters at other organizations, could cover a speech or a press conference (on the rare occasion those happened) while watching the livestream from their newsroom desks, where they’d have Wi-Fi and power and wouldn’t have to worry about waiting in line at a porta-potty on deadline or some fresh-faced campaign staffer yelling “loading!” right when you’re crafting the perfect nut graph.