The original plan was to buy an old VW bus and convert it into a camper. After spending a lot of time with two Land Rover fanatics, and one or two test drives, they managed to convince us to forget the bus idea ( although we find the VW bus still an excellent choice :-) ).
We searched for several months and really scraped the bottom of the barrel. Its seems that “excellent condition” meant that it started, but had more rust than metal. Then just outside of Heidelberg we hit the jackpot. We found OUR Landy, it was love at first sight.
Since we can only work on our Land Rover on weekends, and didn’t have time or energy to spend every weekend working on it. It has taken well over a year to convert it from what it was to what we want. We do live in a wonderful area of Bavaria and it would be a shame not to take advantage of what is available to us. The end result may not be perfect, but it’s got its own charm and we like it!
Mechanical Mysteries – a Late Night Comedy
The Topes (speed bumps) in Mexico had proven a bit too much for the tired old shocks and springs especially after running over a few at full speed…. So, we planned a maintenance stop in Oaxaca at Overland Oasis. We ordered a complete new set of Terra Firma shocks and new front Springs for the […]
Edmonton – “Pit Stop”
July 18th – 30th, 2015 We knew going into this trip that a big challenge for us, should something on the Land Rover break, would be finding parts. It’s not that Land Rovers aren’t sold in North America; it’s more that the Defender line was never sold so parts aren’t found just anywhere. You have […]
Preparing for Departure
The first week of March was pretty hectic mostly because of the “why do today what you can do tomorrow” mentality that we both seem to have. As it so happens a lot of things were left to the last-minute, or in our case the last week. We both worked almost every day on small […]
Time to re-trim the Defender Seats
The seats in our Land Rover Defender are finished, I mean really finished, finished enough that every time we sit in the seats a puff of foam dust comes out of the cracks around the metal base, looking much like a bad case of dandruff, and on the new black carpeting to boot! After almost […]
The Last 20 Percent
I’m getting pretty tired of saying “almost finished”, but it is really almost finished. One could almost go so far as to say that we are currently experiencing the “old” 80/20 rule. 80% of the work on our Land Rover was completed relatively quickly and now the last 20% seems to take for ever! But […]
Storage is King
As the saying goes “the more you know, the less you need” however, for most of us the more comfort you want, the more “stuff” you inevitably end up wanting to take with you. Making the most of the available space becomes a top priority, though one that must be balanced with comfort. For us […]
Webasto Air Heater
Lets not kid ourselves in some parts of the world winter comes early and stays long. While our Howling Moon roof tent is well built; sleeping in single digit temperatures for long periods can be wearing. The desire for warmth and coziness could push us to blowing our rather tight budget on hotels and motels. The […]
Addons Galore
Our landrover got some much needed addons, ok they have been planned for some time it had just taken some time for our roof rack from Qualan to arrive, now that it was here we could add our Howling Moon and Foxwing after which we would be ready to test them out during our August […]
New Tires and a Check-up
It was that time again the TÜV (Department of Vehichles) saftey inspection is due at the end of July, so I wanted to make sure at least the base floor in the landrover was finished. I also wanted to fix a couple rust bubbles that were forming on the rear cross member before bringing it […]
Insulation and Headlining Complete
Although we hadn’t planned on working the entire weekend on the Land Rover it ended up being one of our most visibly productive weekends in a long time. We have spent months tinkering on the car most of the work thus far has been disassembly work, but this weekend saw our first major steps forward. […]
Double Battery System
It took almost four days but I have finally managed to get the double battery system that I bought from Trip-Tec installed. A double battery system is rather important if you are going to be running accessories like a fridge/cooler or heater or even if you want to listen to the stereo for long periods […]