Read Our Books
“This is no hippie quest, it’s a methodical embrace of a new life that simultaneously requires extensive planning, yet none whatsoever.”
— Jay Baer, New York Times Bestselling Author
Drive Nacho Drive, Brad and Sheena’s first book, tells the story of their drive from Arizona to the tip of South America. It is a tale about stepping away from the American Dream to drive as far south as it is possible to drive in the world.
927 Days of Summer picks up the story where Drive Nacho Drive left off. It is a documentary of patience, nerve, and adventure along the highways and backroads from Asia’s east coast to America’s west coast – a circumnavigation of the globe – seen through the windshield of an aging VW van.
Part I: Drive Nacho Drive
(From the back cover)
On an afternoon just like many before it, Brad Van Orden sat at his desk. When a coworker meandered past his window, Brad succumbed to an impulse and blurted out the most outlandish thing he could think of—”Hey Steve, let’s drive your hippie bus to Tierra del Fuego.” This prompted Steve’s halfhearted response: “I don’t think so.”
But this got Brad thinking. What if we just dropped everything and left? Isn’t there more to life than this? He messaged his wife with a question: “Want to do this?”, to which she immediately responded: “Yes!” They clearly had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
Drive Nacho Drive tells the hilarious and sometimes harrowing story of what happens when Brad and Sheena trade in the American Dream for a year on the roads of Central and South America aboard “Nacho”, their quirky and somewhat temperamental Volkswagen van.
As a result of questionable decision-making skills and intermittent bad luck, Brad and Sheena repeatedly find themselves in over their heads. Whether negotiating cliff-hanging roads in rebel territory, getting caught illegally smuggling a transmission in a suitcase over international lines, mounting a stealth mission to steal Nacho back from a deranged Colombian auto dismantler, or clinging to the side of a vegetable truck while descending a 16,000 foot Andean pass, there seems to be no limit to the predicaments that these two can get themselves into.
With Drive Nacho Drive, the Van Ordens deliver a thoughtful, hilarious, and mouthwatering depiction of adventure and misadventure on the Pan-American highway—one that will leave you shaking your head and holding your sides, while asking yourself,isn’t there more to life than this?
Part II: 927 Days of Summer
(From the back cover)
In their book Drive Nacho Drive, Brad and Sheena Van Orden traded the American Dream for the open road, and set off in their temperamental 1984 VW van named “Nacho.” After thirteen months of humorous and sometimes demoralizing misadventures along the Pan-American Highway, our intrepid subjects eventually arrived at the southernmost town in the world in Tierra del Fuego.
This is where 927 Days of Summer picks up the trail.
After shipping Nacho from Argentina to Malaysia on a container ship, Brad and Sheena resume their journey, this time with the ambitious goal of driving all the way around the world. When they roll out of the shipping container onto Malaysian soil, their odometer turns over 300,000 miles. Is Nacho really up for the brutal journey ahead?
This hilarious and harrowing tale cuts through the sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia to the buzzing hornet’s nest of India, from the remote Nepalese Himalayas to the stony hills of Anatolia, on to the Sahara Desert of Africa, through Europe and beyond.
Whether dodging rickshaws on crater-filled roads, defying Maoist rebels on cliff-hanging Himalayan tracks, getting hopelessly stuck in the desert on the Pakistani border, or becoming the subjects of an international missing persons case in the remote mountains of Laos, there is never a dull moment in 927 Days of Summer.
Come along as a diverse cast of characters guides our determined travelers through a world of unfolding landscapes and cultures on the road trip to end all road trips, and then ask yourself: can you really just go home, unpack, and eat a sandwich?