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tmckeon88
01-19-2013, 01:24 PM
I am starting a thread to share my long trip in my 1969 IIA 88" along the Pan American highway system, which took place from June - December of 2000. We dubbed the trip "Ushuaia or Bust" as Ushuaia is the last town in Tierra del Fuego, the terminus of the Pan-Am route.

My wife and I thought up this idea in the late 90s as sort of an adventure to embark on, since we were both teachers and had some time to devote to the idea. I had been into Land Rovers for several years and she was a Spanish teacher s the skills seemed to fit. (We are no longer together, for unrelated reasons, but I will continue to refer to her as my wife as she was during the trip.)

The planning started with a rebuild of the truck, which I bought in 1994 from John Hawkins in Kenduskeag, ME. It already had a rebuilt 2.3 L gas engine and the 4-headlight modification and was in good running shape overall. It is registered as a '69 but from what I can gather from serial numbers it has the engine ansd drive train from a 1960; it may just have some later body panels. And of course after the rebuild it had a lot of new parts.

I am only a very amateur mechanic so my rebuild will seem sloppy to many member of this form who have real skills. The Rover is luckily very forgiving. So I hope you will be as well when you see some of my bodges. To my credit, the truck is still running and is my daily commuting car, so I must have gotten most of the nuts and bolts back on in the right places. I need to scan my prints of the rebuild into jpgs which I will try to do as soon as I can.

If people have questions or thoughts about what you would like to hear about or discuss in the thread, please let me know. I am new to starting a thread so I hope I don't make too many mistakes. We can talk about road conditions, availability of gas/food/lodging, costs, passport and travel carnet issues, vehicle shipping, Macchu Picchu, or whatever.

A few pictures to get us started:

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1 & 2 Us before departing, with the truck loaded
3. Ferry crossing Lake Champlain. (We left from Wiscasset, ME on June 30, 2000, headed across to Burlington, VT, then across NY and into Canada, crossing above the Great Lakes. Our intent was to travel the AlCan highway to Alaska, get up as for north as we could on the Dalton Highway, then turn around and head down the west coast of the Americas in the system of highways called the Pan-American.)
4&5 Wildlife in Alaska and Canada.

Well, there's a start. I hope people find this interesting. I'll try to get a few rebuild photos in there as soon as I can and you can gawp at my silver haired father watching me take over and make a mess of his garage!

Cheers,
Tom

JimCT
01-19-2013, 03:15 PM
I can not wait to see the rest of the trip, my wife and i have talked about doing just that trip, have her take a half year sabbatical. Share all the details! thanks, Jim

Contractor
01-19-2013, 04:43 PM
Very cool, keep posting.

Revtor
01-19-2013, 08:03 PM
Please post more, I'd love to read and see all about your journey!!

tmckeon88
01-20-2013, 09:06 AM
Update #2

Some information about our rebuild of the Rover. I won't call it a restoration because we were in a bit of a hurry and could not observe all the niceties, but our intention was to get a galvanized frame, redo the brakes throughout, new clutch, some new wiring and troubleshoot whatever came up. We got involved in the RN restoration discount program which saved us considerable funds, and we bought just about everything through them. (They were also very helpful during the trip, calling to have parts shipped to Alaska and so forth as the need arose.)

Before:
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We parked the truck in my dad's garage in June of 1999 and started dismantling. Most stuff comes apart fairly readily. I had done a new transmission and clutch before and numerous brake/hub seal jobs, so I felt like I could tackle it. We did resort to a Sawzall a few times to cut spring bolts and used lots of PB blaster and WD-40, as well as a 6 foot section of pipe that we nicknamed "The Torque Multiplier" or "Senor Torquemada." A few sticky bolts would give a loud squeal when they finally surrendered to Senor Torquemada.

More shots of the tear-down:
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We put in new front springs. I had replaced the rears a couple of years before (in a crippling 14-hour session of trying to turn the shackle bolts) so I didn't think they needed to be changed, but it turned out with the additional load the Rover would be carrying, the rear end would settle down pretty far. We were dragging our tail a lot during that trip. Of course, we overpacked, but I can discuss the packing rationale later.

More tear down shots:

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My little 2.25L engine has been a real trouper throughout the time I've had it. The previous owner had it rebuilt and the hardened valves for unleaded gas put in, but otherwise it's a 1960 7:1 compression engine with a Weber single barrel carb and an upgraded distributor, the later Lucas type. I've put over 100,000 miles on this engine just since I've owned it (and replaced the speedo in 1996) so it has a lot more than that under its belt. It still starts quickly and runs smoothly even to this day, and I've hardly done more than tune-ups and valve cover gasket replacements. If I could only keep the oil inside it instead of on the driveway!

We replaced the rear door (and last summer I replaced that door yet again - frame rust) and I fooled around over the following year with getting a custom-drilled piece of rear glass that I could mount a wiper motor in, but that glass cracked pretty soon and it just stayed cracked for years until a I gave up on that and put in plain glass and a wiper mounted in the upper frame, above the window. I loves me some clear windows. I also have fussed with rear-window defrosters and never had any luck getting them to work, so right now my rear glass is just plain and I am super cautious on cold rainy days when the windows fog.

The day the truck arrived with the galvanized frame was exciting. I was leery of how to move it but it turned out the truck driver, my dad and I managed to just carry it into the garage on set it against the wall. I should have done more to clear the bolt holes of zinc, but I only learned of that later. I did spray it all over with Ospho, a phosphoric acid solution that bonds with iron to create iron phosphate, an inert rust-resistant shell. Any dings in the galvanizing I hoped to fill with this to stave off corrosion.

We sold the old frame to a kid who actually drove down from Nova Scotia to collect it in a big pick up truck. The frame wasn't in bad shape; lots of oil all over it of course. The transmission cross member was banged up from some ancient off-roading incident before I owned it. He seemed happy to have it, so we got it all loaded up and tied and down and wished him well.

Next up: a few more reassembly notes and maybe some comments on planning to visit several countries and cross borders with an foreign vehicle.

tmckeon88
01-20-2013, 04:36 PM
Update #3.

Some more notes about the rebuild:

We got the truck more or less back together. There were some mishaps, mostly due to my ignorance of electrical issues such as when I burned up several sets of points because the high tension lead from the coil bypassed the coil altogether, so the full battery current was running through the points on the distributor. But once I sorted that out, it actually started up fairly easily after 6 weeks of being torn to pieces.

At that point though, I realized that I hadn't wired the instruments and lights back together properly so I ended up having it towed to a local garage and a mechanic put in a bunch of new wiring and got it more or less running. This took a few weeks; we returned home and I had to go get the truck a few weeks later. This was all the year before the trip so I had anticipated having a long shakedown period.

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We repainted the truck (just with a brush) in Rover Bronze Green with Limestone wheels and top. The brush painting is a bit ghetto, but since I don't have too many vanities the appearance of the truck, it worked out fine. (I've brush painted it several times since then.) The previous color was something called "Cameroon Green" which had more of a bluish cast to it, so once we started repainting one part, we had to do the whole thing.

The bulkhead was a bit of a Frankenstein job, which at the time I did out of expediency. I didn't realize until later that bulkheads were hard to come by and tricky to keep in good shape (I'm thinking of the great bulkhead rebuilds you see here sometimes on the forums) so I'm sort of stuck with what I have. I had some pieces of 1/8" aluminum cut and bent to match the two kick panels (which were rusted) and I bolted those in, and also put in the galvanized panels that were there, so I have nice thick kick panels but the overall geometry of the bulkhead isn't quite true anymore. If I do in all again, I'll take some time and trouble to get it restored more properly.

We had some trouble getting the doors to line up and so forth, (they're still not perfect) so there was a lot of fussing and fitting. I eventually managed to get it all bolted back together and over the course of the next months, I more or less got it all working again. We had a oldish Fairey overdrive, freewheeling hubs and 16" wheels, and someone gave us a full set of BF Goodrich All-Terrain ATs (more about those later).

It sill has oil leaks, and the rear axle casing is slowly disintegrating, but at this point we had most of the mechanicals in order. All new brake lines, one new hub, new front springs, some new wheel cylinders, galvanized frame, etc. Most of what we fixed has stayed fixed. It's now twelve years on, so some things, like the brake lines, are in need of replacement again. There were also some odd things, like the new canvas axle stops, which looked great when they went on, but caused unusual problems later on.

So- next post, I'll mention a few things about the stuff we packed, and about preparations such as contacting the State Department for information on traveling through Colombia (their response: don't do it).

Cheers- off to see if the Patriots can secure a place at the Superbowl.

siii8873
01-20-2013, 07:55 PM
We got involved in the RN restoration discount program which saved us considerable funds

What is this?? I've restored a few vehicles and never heard mention of this program???

Revtor
01-20-2013, 08:29 PM
Thanks for the posts Tom, it's a great read!

ThePhotographer
01-20-2013, 10:16 PM
We got involved in the RN restoration discount program which saved us considerable funds

What is this?? I've restored a few vehicles and never heard mention of this program???

This is a program we had long ago for frame up restoration customers. Unfortunately it was an accounting nightmare and it became too difficult to continue.

tmckeon88
01-21-2013, 10:04 AM
Whoops, guess I made a bit of a faux pas there. The restoration discount gave something like 20% off purchases following a frame purchase for a certain number of months or whatever. Too bad it's discontinued, but on the other hand in those days there were very few Proline parts available. Nowadays prices seem easier to afford on many items.

Another update later today-

Revtor
01-21-2013, 06:02 PM
I like that front bumper you got Tom, was it on the truck when you got it?

tmckeon88
01-22-2013, 10:55 AM
Yes, it was- then when it finally rusted out I got a galvanized replacement through DAP Enterprises, but unfortunately it is no longer available. I think it's set at a bad height, like trap-a-toddler-under-the-car height, so it's not sold in the US. I'd still have the galvanized one except we had a little accident a couple of years ago and bent it, so I'm back to the stock bumper now.

We tried to have that galvanized bull bar straightened at a local metal fab shop, but after trying to bend it by lowering a bulldozer blade onto it (and failing) we reckoned it was not fixable. A shame.

Update: Trip planning.

I wanted to mention something about the vehicle carnet, which is like a passport for the car, which greatly facilitates passing through border checkpoints. It's a document that has several copies of all the relevant info about the car, and also represents the fact that you have set aside a bond for the full value of the vehicle so that you can show that you don't intend to sell or dump the car in a foreign country. Especially important in Central/South America where you might have people trying import used American cars in order to sell them sort of in a black market sense in a foreign country. Information about it is available through the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA). Apparently the AAA doesn't arrange them, or at least they didn't in those days. Very helpful document, although it was a pain to have set the cash aside for that. I did half in cash, half on my credit card. (We had to have a RN appraisal of the vehicle done to have a specific figure to give them.)

Other plans: We contacted the US State department for tourist updates on all the countries we were visiting, as well as the embassies/consulates for most of them. Usually we would get back some helpful maps and brochures from various countries. The state department sent us a big "No way" concerning Colombia, where kidnappings and other problems were rampant, especially for an obviously foreign vehicle like ours, so we decided to skip Colombia altogether. There's no road route from Panama into Colombia anyway (see information about the 1970s Darien Gap Expedition - Land Rovers and Range Rovers trying to slash through the jungle) so we planned to have the truck container shipped from Panama to Ecuador. We would fly, and meet the truck in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and continue from there.

Packing: Basically we wanted to cover the bases of being able to camp, hike and be comfortable. The timing was such that it would be summer or spring much of the time. We didn't bring any dress clothes (I might have packed a tie). We didn't have a rooftop tent (they don't seem to make sense to me, unless there's a major snake/scorpion issue or something; you lose your roof rack space) but just our usual backpacking rig. The camping stuff ended up taking most of the roof rack space because it's isn't very heavy and you don't need except at most once a day. So we had tent, tarp, backpacks, sleeping bags, pads, field kitchen stuff, MSR stove and fuel. I'm comparatively minimalist when it comes to camping (think 7 lb tent rather than 3-room screen house) so we had a fairly compact camping rig. I brought a 5-gallon water jerry can (plastic), a water filter (slow, but I'm glad we had it), iodine tablets, and a few recipes. As far as food goes, we brought what we might have on any camping trip. I imagine people on the forum here already know what they like to do for camping and eating outdoors, so I won't say too much about it. Except maybe for the Fry-Bake pan- this is a heavy aluminum pan that can act as a Dutch oven as well as a fry pan. If you're not backpacking it's very handy- we baked and sauted in it. Good for canoe and car camping too, and comes in two sizes.

Having said all that, we didn't camp as much as I imagined we would. We did more in Canada and the US where the sites were plentiful and clean, much less so once we entered Mexico. Lodgings were comparatively cheap after that anyway, and I am soft enough to enjoy a shower and a real bed after being deafened and dust covered for 4 - 5 hours. I did learn a few things about cooking and eating on the road.

Next Update: spare parts and tools.

tmckeon88
01-23-2013, 06:26 AM
Update: Some camping pictures. We generally were car camping of course so we could carry whatever food we wanted. We had a small cooler (as I recall) but of course we did not always have ice for it, etc., but it was handy. We usually pitched our tarp over the cooking area.

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These are mostly sites in Canada and Alaska. We had a few memorable episodes with the voracious mosquito populations you sometimes encounter up north- in one primitive provincial campsite in British Columbia we we warmed by the worst mosquitoes I have ever seen and after hastily cooking something and eating we jumped into the tent at about 6:00. You could then hear the general hum of thousands of mosquitoes lighting on the tent. It made me think of the early travelers and Indians in these areas, for whom this was a daily fact of life.

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Because we sort of gave up on camping much in Mexico and Central America, I think the single can of Coleman fuel we brought lasted us the whole time. (It would swell and contract interestingly as we went up and down in altitude.) The MSR Whisperlite stove we were using is a solid piece of equipment- they used to be temperamental but I have been very pleased with ours. i've used it from probably 15 years without a hitch and with very little maintenance.

We liked making tortillas in camp because it's quick and easy and seems more homemade than boiling up dried soups and so forth. They are easy; mostly just flour, salt, water and a little baking powder, then rolled out using a water bottle as a roller and cooked quickly on a dry pan. The only drawback was having unmarked bags of white powders (flour, etc.) when our car was repeatedly searched in Mexico. We emerged from that safely though.

Camping recommendations: Thunder Bay area of Lake Superior, anywhere in British Columbia, which is beautiful, Oregon and California. BC really stands out in my memory as being spectacular everywhere you went. We preferred national forest and provincial parks to private campgrounds, because you can get further from the RV crowd that way. I like to have it quiet and private when I'm camping, maybe from my backpacking experience where you are usually far from crowds.

Next time I'll get into the actual travel pictures. Sorry if I don't have tons of Rover pix in this; there are some here and there but much of the time we were just driving on roads so nothing exciting there. There are some breakdown/repair stories which I will relate. Spoiler alert:

Antarctic ocean in Ushuaia (we made it):
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smukai
01-23-2013, 09:19 AM
Enjoying this thread and dreaming.

Thanks for the continual posts!

tmckeon88
01-23-2013, 09:58 AM
Update: Crossing Canada 1

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We went through NH, VT, NY and into Canada above the Great Lakes. We stayed with friends and camped at Thunder Bay on Lake Superior (I think). Roads of course all good- we were planning to get on the Alcan highway eventually. Notably in the Great Lakes area we came upon a tractor-trailer carrying orange juice that had just overturned on an incline. The driver & passenger were shaken up but not hurt too bad; we got out our big first aid box and dabbed some cuts and bruises but nothing major. We waited for an ambulance and then were on our way.

It probably bears noting that we had no phone with us, or computer. We had to occasionally make calls but there are plenty of phones in the world so that was no problem. Once in a while we had to prevail upon a passerby to make a call for us but generally it was not an issue.

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Starting the Alaska highway in Dawson, BC.

I don't have a lot of strong memories of crossing Canada- it was nice, friendly people and so forth, but it was about two weeks of sameness and low-quality coffee. The great plains area of the US extends up into the Canadian prairies so there long stretches of uninterrupted flat land. We were also sort of fighting the westerly headwinds much of the time so we were sometimes slowed to about 45 miles an hour ,despite the overdrive. We would try to get in the baffles of big trucks sometimes to travel in their slipstream, but that was sort of dangerous. Mechanical problems: just my perennial weak brakes, that always take a couple of pumps no matter how much adjusting I did. (I solved this problem many years later, just last summer in fact, and for the first time I have decent brakes. It turned out that my right front backing plate had a lower pin broken loose, so the shoes were sort of floating on a moving pin, so you could never fully adjust to take up the slack in the system. I found a replacement and put that in, along with new drums and pads, and a little machining later - presto, proper brakes. I can't believe I lived with it for 15 years.)

We crossed into BC and got onto the real Alaska highway which is mostly gravel out that way, although they were in the process of paving it and I imagine it's all done now. It was built originally during WWII to allow military materiel to be moved more quickly to Alaska in case of a Japanese attack on that territory. It has been continually upgraded. Traveling in some traffic there was the first time I had really encountered a bad dust problem. We ended up closing all the windows despite the summer weather, then trying to open them all to create a draft to keep the dust out, etc. Not successful. It was here too we got hit with a flying piece of gravel that put a small hole in our radiator, and we learned by it is all the trucks have fine screens in front of their radiators on these gravel highways. I got a section of screen at a hardware store and wired it to the back of my grill to keep stones out, but too late. (It's still there, in fact.) Because of this gradual seeping of coolant, we spent several days topping it up every morning and trying all manner of tricks such as pouring pepper into the radiator to create sort of a plug and also using some of that aluminized power that purports to do the same thing. None of it entirely successful. One thing I find noteworthy is that the Rover will continue running even if some systems are not working 100%. In a modern car, if one module or sensor goes, sometimes the whole thing can be immobilized. (On the other hand, no A/C in the Rover!)

We got into Alaska and made our way to Fairbanks fairly uneventfully.
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Next up: Alaska and the Dalton Highway.

Revtor
01-23-2013, 01:29 PM
Awesome Tom!

disco2hse
01-24-2013, 04:37 PM
Enjoying your thread and looking forward to the next instalment.

tmckeon88
01-25-2013, 09:55 AM
Update: Alaska, the Dalton Highway and the Arctic Circle

We drove through some notable locations in BC and the Yukon Territory (it still amazes me to have visited the Yukon, after have read a bunch of Robert Service and Jack London as a kid). Whitehorse, Yukon is a great little town with a natural history museum describing Beringia, the prehistoric landmass encompassing Alaska and eastern Russia, connected by a land bridge then. They have fossils and reconstructions bears and giant sloths and so forth. Keeping an eye on the radiator levels, we drove to Fairbanks to get ready for the final push up the Dalton Highway.

I'm having some trouble with uploading these pictures; as I recall these are slides of prints and are not great quality anyway. We camped in Fairbanks in a commercial campground that was unfortunately noisy and dirty, so we were glad to get our supplies and head north with full jerry cans, water jugs and food.

The Dalton highway runs alongside the famous Alaska pipeline, which we criss crossed a number of times. It's essentially a big pipe on a raised scaffold crossing the tundra. I've heard that the friction of the oil running through the pipe keeps the temperatures around it above freezing. The road is gravel, but big and wide and generally in good condition, so you can get going 50-60 mph if you are inclined, but watch out when the big trucks come barreling along because that's really their road, not yours. We got more stones and chips thrown at us and got a chip in our windshield, which is still there as a reminder to me. I had that screen over the front grill so the radiator was protected, but we were traveling on borrowed time because we had to keep adding water to the radiator and I began to worry that we would never be able to make it without an overheating problem which might really damage the engine. We crossed the Arctic Circle (again, my picture files are too large for some reason) and went on. We had planned for stop in Coldfoot, Alaska, where there is a little restaurant and PO, and there we had to assess our plan.
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As you can see, Coldfoot offers few amenities. There were lots of trucks and truckers though and I asked around to see if there were any mechanics who could patch our radiator, but no luck. It was gray and drizzling and muddy and not an auspicious day generally. We ended up going as bit further on to stay at a national forest campground but at that point we decided to take the better part of valor and return to Fairbanks.

We had intended to go all the way up the Dalton to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay, where the big oil refineries for the Arctic Sea are, but we were concerned with not finding lodging or fuel, and also with the fact that the oil companies limit access to that area. Not just anyone can blunder in. So we sort of consoled ourselves with the idea that we had gotten into the Arctic and a mechanical fault forced us back, but we hadn't really lost too much. On the return trip we were stopping to refill the radiator every few miles, so it had gotten pretty bad (despite the large dose of coarse ground pepper I had dumped into the radiator from the little diner in Coldfoot).

We got back to Fairbanks and stayed at a B&B rather than camping. I had had a new speedo cable sent to that address (ours had failed in Yukon somewhere) and had a memorable time lying on the side of the street trying to get it installed around the overdrive unit. We also washed the truck- it had picked up a thick ,velvety layer of dust from the gravel Dalton Highway. We sought out a radiator shop and persuaded them to repair the radiator- if I removed it myself and delivered it. So , I parked the truck at their shop, got out the wrenches and removed the radiator and gave it to them to work on. The shop was staffed entirely by women, which I found notable at the time, and apparently mostly worked on giant tractor-trailer radiators, big, finned monolithic slabs of copper. But they got ours fixed in a day and I put it back in and it never gave us any more trouble. We hiked around where the Yukon River cuts close to town and rode bikes around that were loaned to us. Now that we had reached the "beginning" of our southward route we felt like we'd turned a corner.

Other mechanical issues: we were averaging about 18 miles to the gallon. It actually improved over the course of the trip, perhaps because running the engine at high revs for so long burned away some gunk. My mileage now is worse. We lost the speedo but got that replaced (although this car tends to eat speedo cables, I've found). We still had the weak brake issue which never got better and my rear hubs tended to leak oil. I repeatedly pulled the drive flanges and resealed things, but it never got fully fixed until somewhat later, after the trip. We were consuming oil as usual and generally couldn't get oil changes because quick-lube places wouldn't have the canister replacement filters for us. But generally the car started every day and ran all day without too much fuss. We would usually drive through two or three tanks of fuel a day, maybe 500 miles on a big day. That's a lot in the hot, noisy truck. We had a radio but usually couldn't hear it well. We both learned to doze sitting up in the passenger seat with a pillow on the lap. So we were making headway.
Next: Back in the USA.

disco2hse
01-25-2013, 01:21 PM
A note on preparing photos for upload. I tend to use Photoshop to resize mine to a constant size if there is a limit on the site I am uploading to. 800 pixels on the longest side, JPEG format and use the best quality setting. Seems to work most times.

The other thing, if you use one of the photo sharing sites like Google+, you can upload your scan and resize them using the image location url. For example the image below is of my friend, Jerry's cool Carawagon in Australia. The image location is

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XvnrkatIjKk/UOSpw7uNyiI/AAAAAAAAAfs/_0Rq6Ei7_bg/s805/P1030964.JPG

The important bit is s805. That denotes the size. Change to make it bigger or smaller.

s805 ==

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XvnrkatIjKk/UOSpw7uNyiI/AAAAAAAAAfs/_0Rq6Ei7_bg/s805/P1030964.JPG

s350 ==

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XvnrkatIjKk/UOSpw7uNyiI/AAAAAAAAAfs/_0Rq6Ei7_bg/s350/P1030964.JPG

Important: Deselect the "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" check box if you don't want it copied to this site.

tmckeon88
01-31-2013, 09:42 AM
Update: Alaska-BC-Pacific NW

Just a few pictures to show of the return trip down from Alaska. After getting our radiator and speedo cable sorted out, we headed down through British Columbia which is a spectacular place that I recommend to anyone. Mountains, lakes, even semi arid landscapes, plenty of places to camp and so forth.

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Some black bears and a grizzly in the distance. (We were in the truck at the time so we could do a quick getaway if need be.) Beautiful provincial parks and campgrounds, although I encountered ferocious mosquitoes here a few times too. This part of the trip went fairly smoothly as I recall- we were just tooling along and adding oil to the engine pretty regularly. The roads were good, just not superhighways.

What was probably most noteworthy was getting close to Vancouver (actually Chiliwack, BC) I was stopped at a gas station and when we pulled away I heard sort of a "kathunk" and then noticed oil drizzling out from under the car. Upon inspection it turned out there was a hole in the rear differential case, right near the bottom by the drain plug, and oil actually dripping out. (I admit part of me thought "Yay! My diff casing still had oil in it!") and we were dead in the water. I got it towed to a garage close by and then there started a chain of phone calling events that ended up with us going to another garage where there was a mechanic who knew Land Rovers (he said he used to race them?!) and who relatively quickly got under it, pulled the differential off, and determined that all of the crown ring bolts had come loose and the diff was essentially floating in the casing back there. One had been jammed against the axle case and made that hole. Well, we were sort of stalled until MORE phone calls were made and he located a distributor of Rover parts located an hour or so away who had a new set of those bolts (and some sundries). We just had to go pick them up. How, without a vehicle? Well, this mechanic actually loaned us the use of his pick-up camper, which we drove down the highway, got the bolts, brought them back, and gave them over to the mechanic. All this happened over the course of a couple of days, during which we stayed at a little B&B in Chiliwack ("Hedgehog Hollow"). I was pretty astonished at how helpful everyone was, which is a theme that ran throughout the trip. When we had mechanical troubles, usual people were only too happy to help the old beast get running again. Once in a while I even had an appropriate spare part on board.

He got it all buttoned up again, had the hole in the casing welded (still holding today) and we were off for Washington State where my wife had relatives. That experience gave me faith that we could find help just about anywhere, a belief that was tested and borne out a few times further down the trail.


Next- Washington, Oregon, California.

Skookumchuck
01-31-2013, 11:34 AM
Great read keep it coming. This is a trip I would love to make someday.

JohnsD90
01-31-2013, 04:58 PM
Very good read so far, always wanted to do the North American/South American Expedition!

tmckeon88
02-24-2013, 09:27 AM
Update 2/24/13 I've uploaded some images to imgur and I'm hoping it will be easier to post them in here. http://i.imgur.com/99bAZEgs.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/WFXrmtNs.jpg

Here are a couple more Alaska pictures, including the marker at the Arctic Circle.

Once we got the differential repair sorted out we crossed into Washington and ended up staying a couple of days in the Seattle/Tacoma area, where I had some sort of eye infection from a bug bite that made my right eye swell shut. We got that treated and were able to move down to Oregon, where we stayed with family out along the Oregon coast at some impressive beach areas.
http://i.imgur.com/4PxmvPks.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/y6fWqous.jpg

In Oregon we also made the trip to Crater Lake National Park, which is well worth the visit if you ever get the chance. We camped at one of the national park sites and did some driving around and hiking. It is an amazing sight, deepest blue water you will ever see, a cinder cone island in the center called Wizard Island. A long-dormant volcano; some of the Native American stories of the area make reference to a great explosion that night have been the eruption that created the crater, which is thought to have happened thousands of years ago. The myths of the area apparently still carry some remnant of that event.

We also drove some of the Oregon coast and stayed with some friends in the Mackenzie River area, in the drier eastern part of the state. I can recommend Oregon as a great vacation place for all kinds of outdoor activities- hiking, biking, canoeing, kayaking, rafting, skiing, mountaineering.

Somewhere along this time I got a new radiator cap too, as ours seemed leaky, and I recall from this point on our radiator troubles seemed solved. We were still having the weak brake issue, which would never really get better until last year's fix, and also the rear hubs would consistently leak oil. I have since fixed that too, but in those days it was a common nuisance.

We drove down the northern California coast and made our way to the SF Bay area, where we stopped for a few days. More later-