*Tap Tap* Is this thing on?
Well folks, it’s been a while.
I had an email exchange with our Emperor a few weeks back, and he encouraged me to get back in the saddle here at Overland & Expedition. I agreed that it was time as well. It’s been too long, you guys.
As I told Pat, I actually owe quite a lot to this positive little community over the last five years or so - for inspiring me to travel overland and to share those experiences with a wider audience. I’ve learned a lot from you guys, and lived vicariously through your adventures.
Who knows where this platform will be headed in the future. From the Herb, on down through Jalopnik and Oppo, G/O is clearly in, uh, a lot of flux.
But until they pull the plug on Kinja, or the virus or the venture capitalists take us all, we might as well continue to share our stories and projects, and, like the sign says, just do what you can.
I don’t really have much of an explanation for my prolonged absence from O&E over the last year or so, or even from our own blog (almost exactly 12 months since our last post!), other than I was just burned out.
Burned out from living abroad, burned out from travel, burned out from writing, burned out from “overlanding”, burned out from social media. So, other than posting occasionally on our shared Instagram page, Julie and I took a long break starting in July last year after we put our Land Rover Defender on a container ship, and came back to the States from Africa. We hunkered down in our tiny house at the foot of a mountain in western Montana, reconnected with our friends and our families, and took stock.
Later in July, Dan Grec invited us to the Rocky Mountain Overland Rally in Gunnison, CO to talk about Africa. Lacking a “proper” overlanding rig (she was still en route from Singapore), we made a snap decision to pull my 1971 Beetle out of 30 months of cold storage, made sketchy plans to throw an old tent and a cooler in the back and hit the road. After a quick tune-up, brake adjustment, new tires, and a gas tank restoration, our old friend made the 1800 mile round trip to Colorado without a single hitch (We did run out of gas at one point - my bad. Full story to follow).
There, we met the organizers, Ray and Marianne Hyland, and also Jared and Jen from The Pioneering Spirit, whose own Africa adventures just barely missed overlapping with our own. Jared and Jen would come to hang out with us in Missoula a few weeks later. (Julie and I will be at the rescheduled sister event to the Rocky Mountain O.R., the Northwest Overland Rally in September 2020, if you want to see #totothelandrover in person!). We really enjoyed the Rally - the vibe is much closer to what I imagine Overland Expo was back in the early days.
At the end of August, we spent nine agonizing days in the beautiful but very expensive city of Vancouver, B.C., Canada, hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB, struggling to free our Land Rover Defender from the clutches of Canadian Customs (another more detailed story for another time).
After finally getting the green light from the port, we rode the bus to a container depot in the middle of nowhere south of Vancouver to find the 20ft steel box we had bade farewell to in Cape Town nearly two months earlier. Toto started on the first turn of the key (of course!), and the helpful folks at the shipping agent placed our rooftop tent back on the Defender’s rack with a forklift. After a celebratory sushi dinner, we left town late and camped one night somewhere near the US border before the long drive home to Montana the next day.
Julie went back to her old job at the library at the university, and I started two new jobs that September - one leading wilderness education field courses for college students, the other directing academic advising in one of the colleges at the University of Montana. We bought a Subaru.
In short, we were getting back to “normal”.
But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last eight months or so in “normal mode”, it’s this: it ain’t us.
In December, Julie walked away from academia - a very successful career that she had built over the last dozen years with hard work and pure, uncut smarts. But two books, countless articles, and a Fulbright fellowship later, she felt she had accomplished all she could in her position at the university, so she jumped ship to the private sector.
She works remotely now full-time for a company that creates online professional development curriculum for librarians and health care workers. And, of course, I’ve also been sent home from my job on campus. I work at the kitchen table these days, and I have discovered that, with the exception of the wilderness field courses, literally 100% of my job can be done online.
So, inevitably, as Spring begins to thaw us out both socially and and climatically here on the northern tier of the United States, the road calls, and we are scheming yet again. Is a fully nomadic life a possibility down the line? Maybe, just maybe.
In any case, I’ve got a notebook full of stories and camera rolls full of photos from our travels in Africa. I’ve got Defender projects (oh, so many projects), and epic trips planned for when this too-big-for-its-britches, two-bit protein-subunit decides to leave us all alone, finally.
In the meanwhile, we’ve been super lucky to publish some other stuff elsewhere. I had a short article in the Fall 2019 issue of Overland Journal on border crossings. Julie wrote a beautiful piece about Toto in the Spring/Summer 2019 issue of Alloy + Grit. Julie also got to feature Tim and Kelsey’s Land Cruiser in an article for the February/March edition of ROVA Magazine, and she was profiled both for Women Overlanding the World, and on Expedition Portal. We were interviewed (and so were Tim and Kelsey!) on the super fun GHT Overland Podcast. Tune in if you want to hear our funny voices from the living room of our former flat in Botswana. Adventure Journal did a quick interview with me as well.
So, expect more from me in the coming weeks and months, and I hope you all will chip in as well! Thanks to Pat and Tim and Kelsey for really keeping the lights on around here over the last year (I’ve been lurking), and I’m so glad to see Rufant has been reposting his Oz travels lately as well.
I leave you with a slideshow cribbed from our Insta, and a few other image caches as well.