NewWorldOverland.ca

Good Evening!

Not much to update here, the ETA for our Land Cruiser is still about 10 days. I’m not trying to sound like a whiner (ok, well maybe I am). The good news is that we’ll have the rig for May long weekend, which is 100% absolutely a go-camping weekend for us. I don’t care if all we do is drive to Wal-Mart and camp in the parking lot, dammit we are camping! Yes sir, and we may even have a roof-top tent to use by then! Oh happy times…

Re: our Route. Everyday that passes, we are more and more convinced that an extended detour through northern South America may be needed. Do yourself a favor, open up Google Earth and mouse around Venezuela, Guyana, French Guyana and Suriname. Make sure to have Panoramio turned on, and browse around clicking happily on the blue stars. See, reading our blog can be fun and educational!

Anyways, planning a trip around pictures on Google Earth would be stupid, so we are researching in our spare time (instead of updating the website haha).

Toodles!

While we were checking out Hannibal’s roof-top tent, we also took a quick peek at their 80 series Land Cruiser rack that they offer. It is aluminium and weighs around 80lbs, but is sturdy enough to hold a roof-top tent, us, and a few jerry cans if need be.

The photos don’t do it justice:

It looks as if the rack “floats” on padding in between the boards, reducing vibration and noise on the road. In the above photo, you can also see the channel that runs around the frame, allowing for flexible mounting of the side rails. The side rails themselves can be trimmed to fit your requirements, and they mount using simple aluminium plates (as shown in the top photo.)

The rack mounts in the gutters of the truck, using several clamps along the way to secure it.

With the 1.4m tent mounted to the rack, there is a nice little patio space for us on top of the truck. Just imagine the panoramas you can get from 2m in the air! That’s prime photo real estate!

This weekend we checked out one of the candidates for the roof-top tent, the Hannibal 1.4m. Tim and Dave from the Great Canadian Expedition Company were nice enough to set up their demo tent on the Wrangler so we could see just how these things tick.

Overall we were impressed by the layout, it sure beats sleeping on the ground! I was a little worried about the ladder at first, but it was as sturdy as a rock.

The nice thing about the Hannibal tent is the windows; all of them unzip and open fully, with a screen, or can be closed completely. Also, there are window awnings that can be setup quickly after you unfold the tent incase of bad weather. There is an optional rain fly, but we’re thinking it would be easy enough to just throw a large tarp over the tent in poor weather. If the tarp is big enough, it’ll cover most of the truck too!

This is one of the most popular roof-top tent out there, not that this style of tent is by any means popular over here. It’s well thought out, rugged and priced well.

Definetly food for thought!

P.S. Can’t wait to go camping!

Completely Unrelated Picture Of the Day

Website

After many sleepless nights, the website has been yet again updated! Please contain yourself.

Land Cruiser

Word on the street is that our Land Cruiser will be shipping from Vancouver at the end of this week, complete with new OME 3″ Heavy/Heavy suspension. Once it gets here, it will need an out of province inspection, and then happy days are here! Just in time to get it stuck in the mud!

Roof Top Tent

This weekend we will be checking out one of the possibilities for our roof-top tent. What’s a roof-top tent? Well, it’s a tent that’s on your roof. Now that we have all of the technical jargon out of the way, here are some links to our candidates:

• Hannibal
• ARB

Picture Post

From now on, I will be posting a picture at the start of every blog entry. Why? Because I said so. I will call it the “Completely Unrelated Picture Of the Day.”

Check out newworldoverland.ca to see our website! We don’t have much content up right now, but stay tuned as we’ll be putting all the pieces together over the next few weeks.

Enjoy!

Mike