In the beginning...........

Somewhere in Tanzania

It all started back in July 2009 after touring the national parks of Tanzania whilst on safari, spectacular in itself but the one thing that made it incredible for both of us was the mode of transport.

An old Land Rover Defender which we loved but it didn't fill us with confidence when it came to safety and comfort!

Especially when we were under a tree in the Serengeti with the roof open and it wouldn't start. "No big deal it's a Defender that's normal!" I hear you say.We'd agree if it was a leafy lane in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, however it wasn't it was the Serengeti, under a tree which happened to have a lion in it......

And as for comfort all we will say is "corrugations"  once you've experienced them you will know what we mean, but these were just minor things considering the freedom and access we got from traveling this way.

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Picking Ruby up from Jake Wright's

It had dawned on both of us that whilst we had traveled to many places throughout the world we had being missing out on one of the greatest ways
to travel.....Independently overland.

Needless to say it wasn't long after our return to the UK that year that we
started looking at Defenders and dipping our toe into the world of overland travel.It was only a matter of time before we took
the decision and bought an M Reg 300 Tdi Defender.

It didn't take long before we had named her Ruby and knew that she would
be with us on many adventures for years to come.

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More space means more stuff, that's good right?

Now we had Ruby the list of questions about how to fit her out and where to go seemed endless and soon realised that we could end up spending huge amounts of money and needed to come up with a plan.....

But before that a trip to Loch Lomond was planned for Easter.

Easter 2010 eventually arrived and already having all of the camping equipment we needed we packed Ruby ready to set off and realised having loads of space only meant one thing.

We could take more stuff with us!!!

Whilst having substantially more space  seemed like a good idea we quickly realised that this wasn't the best thing as the air turned blue whilst Gavin looked for the gas bottle key amongst the mountain of bags etc.

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Anyone for a brew

We had also decided that we were going to remove the rear bench seats from Ruby and fit a load guard which was a good thing as it was a particularly cold that Easter in Loch Lomond and we had taken to brewing up in the back out of the cold.

Yes this was probably the single most stupid thing we have done but this only dawned on both of us as the flames licked up the back of one of the highly flammable bench seats.

Luckily we had some water handy to dowse the flames and after our hysteria had stopped we both managed to laugh about it and needless to say that was the last of the back seat brews.

After a great but cold trip to Scotland we had an idea of the first work we wanted doing so it was back to Jake Wright's to get some new shock absorbers and a front runner roof rack fitted in preparation for our first trip abroad in Ruby. 

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