Expedition Portal recently awarded us the 2015 Overlanders of the Year! We are honored and humbled by this recognition, and hope that our story inspires more to get out on the open road, doing what makes you happy. We’ve reprinted the story from ExPo below, written by Christophe Noel.
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The short-winded story: We’ve released our second book! 927 Days of Summer is now available as a paperback and e-book! Wahoo!
But behind every short-winded story, there is a long-winded story…
It recently occurred to me that if I were not myself, but a reader of this blog, I might be wondering what Brad and Sheena did with themselves upon their return from their 927 days of wonder. Give in to Sheena’s discovered love for miniature barking deer and start a deer farm? Capitalize on Brad’s affinity for replacing wheel bearings and start a VW repair shop? No, and no. Please. It was nothing like that. There was a short period of jubilation, followed by a brief period of soul-searching and uncertainty, and then I locked myself in my mother’s closet. For thirty hours. I don’t have any idea what Sheena was doing during that time because we had separated. Temporarily! We had separated temporarily because she thought that my idea of locking myself in a closet was asinine, and she had better things to do.
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It was just good luck that we had come to know Sven. We had first heard from him over two years ago when we were still in Mexico. By the time we hit Belize, only three months after leaving home, he had invited us to stay at his house when we got to Sweden. Great, we thought, this would be the perfect opportunity to stage a pilgrimage. An adventure twenty years in the making.
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With our foam mattress cover folded out of the way which we bought at a double mattress sale, I laid out the last of our contraband on the bed. I leaned back, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and inspected my work. I carefully rolled the mattress cover out over the bed, concealing the bounty in a foam sandwich. I smoothed the yak hair blanket over the whole mess and crawled down into Nacho’s living quarters where Sheena had just finished stuffing the rest of our contraband under the couch. Using the power drill I ran two screws through the bottom of the seat and tested it to be sure it couldn’t be opened. I got out, picked up the ugly chicken wire cage that I had built on the bank of the canal and slid it into place behind the front seats.
“Let’s just hope they don’t find any of this,” I said. Sheena nodded, nervously wringing her hands. A rower sliced through the dark water of the canal, barely taking notice of us inspecting our work. Scraps of chicken wire and wood littered the ground around the van.
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When we left the United States in the early hours of 2012, we began to witness the world changing around us, hardly recognizable from the one we left behind at the Mexican border. At first the changes came hard and fast, but after a while we started to forget how things were back home. By the time we reached Europe it had been nearly a year and a half since we’d visited America, or any Western civilization for that matter, and some of those old memories came flooding back. One deeply disturbing difference between “The West” and the rest of the world showed up like a lurking character in a nightmare.
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After Nacho’s inspirational climb of the Alpe d’Huez we descended the switchbacks and were deposited in the quaint village of Bourg d’Oisans. We would spend the next few days making our way northwest to Paris, but before doing so we needed to grab a few odds and ends at the grocery store. We popped into town and found the nearest market, parked, and proceeded to drop essentials into the shopping cart. A medley of vegetables, a package of sausage and one of cheese, a fresh baguette—come on, we’re in France—a twelve pack of Leffe, and then we arrived at the discount bin containing marked down items nearing their expiration dates.
“Sweet baby Jesus, what’s that!” I could barely contain my excitement. “Why Sheena, I do say, it’s a package of nearly-expired, ground up dead horses!”
“Yes please!,” she squealed, and I happily placed it in the cart next to the beer.
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“I know it’s somewhere!” she cried out in frustration as she flipped through a stack of twenty full size trail maps, each showing a mess of trails that slipped between valleys and up endless snow-capped peaks. They were some of the best trails in the world. “He’s like a little kid here,” she said as she held up the stack. “This is like his playground. I swear, if he knew where we were going today,” her eyes widened, “he’d go nuts!” She ran up the stairs and came back with a new stack of maps. “Here it is! Etienne was trying to keep this one all to himself!”
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