4-Aug-2011 – For immediate release

Are you ready to see the country like never before with an incomparable Land Rover Adventure? From August 29 through September 5, 2011 you can join Land Rover to drive off-road in Moab, Utah; Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and Telluride, Colorado.

You’ll be met at the airport in Grand Junction, Colorado to begin your adventure. It all starts when you get the keys to a Land Rover you’ll drive while following the Colorado River. And this scenic tour is just the opener.

More technical driving follows at the ultimate “slick rock trail” Hell’s Revenge as well as other trails. You will drive Land Rovers over Entrada sandstone, climbing and descending slopes approaching 40 degrees. The challenging trail culminates with a vista framed by the Colorado River, overlooking Arches National Park.

There’s more to the world of Land Rover than scaling rugged terrain. We’ll rest your driving muscles as we make you a special guest of the 2011 Telluride Film Festival. Relax and enjoy the town and sponsors’ gathering for a director’s review at the Sheridan Theatre in downtown Telluride.

Your experience in the country steers toward the city as we introduce you to the newest member of the Range Rover family, the all new 2012 Range Rover Evoque. You will be one of the first to drive this latest offering from Land Rover, before its official fall 2011 debut. Drive your own Range Rover Evoque for the remainder of the weekend as we explore historic mining towns of Colorado.

Land Rover Adventures will provide all meals, 5-Star lodging, vehicles, driving instructors and transportation for the 7-day journey. You are only responsible for your flight into Grand Junction Airport, Colorado and a departure flight from either Telluride or Montrose, Colorado. Everything else is up to us. Start your adventure by reserving your spot today.

Exclusive Offer: $13,000 per couple, $9,000 per single (attendees limited to 12 people; first come first served).

To book now, contact our rep at 828-225-1541 or email sandy@landroverschool.com.

We all have the same dream, it’s why we are here.

Sure it may look a little different for each of us, but the essence of it remains the same.

For overlanders, we dream of taking our vehicle, be it truck, car, unimog, bike, or skateboard, and traveling to distant locales. Having our vehicle symbolizes independence, the ability to go where we want to go, on our own schedule, and to try whatever we like. It also gives us a feeling of empowerment, to talk to local people not as tourists, but as travelers.

Alas, not all travel is overland travel. For many of us, much of our travel is work travel.

Usually work travel means you fly into a foreign city, get to meet the friendly local immigration officials, compare how efficient the baggage-claim is to other airports, find a car/bus/cab to the city, check into a hotel, and spend a few days in business meetings. Then you reverse the process, and find yourself back at home.

Of course, most of the time the local people you are meeting with will want to treat you to lunch and dinner and show you a few sights, but often you see the sights that they think you should see, not the places they would hang out at if they didn’t have you along; and you eat at the fancy restaurants, not the places where your local hosts would go for a quick lunch or a cheap dinner.

So you end up having the business-class-version of a package tour. And that is what overlanders usually try to avoid. We want to see the real country, not the one that is packaged for international consumption.

So how can we travel with the spirit of a overlander, when we are not overlanding? First of all, don’t be afraid to get a little bit lost, to ask directions, and to try things.

It is easy to rely on a host to take care of us. But if we say “that’s ok, I think I’d like to walk around tonight and try some food on my own” – suddenly the entire experience changes.

Walking into a corner market, trying to order dinner with hand-signals when nothing on the menu looks familiar, and then trying to pay for it and figure out the local currency will often give you a better feel of the local culture and connection to the local people than a night looking at the local famous landmarks.

Leaving early for a meeting, and figuring out how to take a city bus or train (or tri-shaw, or water-taxi) from your hotel to the office, rather than a cab, will suddenly give you a sense of connection to many of the people you are meeting with in the local office. And when the locals hear that you took a bus to work, or went to “that” market for dinner, suddenly they will look at you a little differently, and maybe they will decide to take you somewhere else, somewhere a little more local, for dinner that night.

This is how connections are started, and how we can start to see the real city, not the prepackaged one, even when we don’t have our vehicle along.

Note – Images via creative-commons-licence.

When we think of adventurous travel, we often think of the “epic” trip, where we spend months planning, packing, preparing, and going on an overland trip to places we have never seen before.

And yet sometimes, adventures can happen unexpectedly.

I am lucky to live in a beautiful spot, a little house in the Northern Cascade Mountains, on the BC side of the border. It is a rugged area, with a mix of steep mountains, un-named glaciers, winding highways, and scenic trails. We are 20 minutes from the nearest town, gas pump, or grocery store which, having moved from the bustle of New York, feels a little like heaven.

But every once in a while mother nature decides to remind us that life in the mountains, while scenic, can also be unpredictable. Yesterday was a good example for me:

Having driven to Vancouver in the morning for a business meeting, I was driving home when I found out that a mud and rock slide had closed the highway that I normally would follow to make it home.

As the heater in my Defender had decided about 10 minutes earlier to only blow cold air, and with the outside temperature hovering around freezing, the thought of a winding detour through the mountains and valleys had less than the usual appeal.

Pulling over to put on my parka, consult my GPS, and confirm I had snow chains, shovel, air-hose, winch-controller and granola bars in the back of the truck, and grumbling at the inconvenience, I set out to find a “scenic route” home.

But a funny thing happened on the way home. After about 40 minutes of driving through little farms, over ancient steel bridges, railroad tracks, and quarry sites, I realized I was no longer in “commuter” mode. Rather than driving down the highway on auto-pilot, I was actively engaged in the drive, the truck, the road, and the scenery around me. And you know what? I was enjoying myself. And I continued to enjoy myself all the way home.

So the drive home took about 90 minutes longer than usual, and I got less work done in the afternoon than I’d planned, and yet, I found myself a little disappointed when I checked the highways-department website this morning and saw that the road was back open.

I guess adventure really is good for you. Even a little adventure.

We at Overland Journal are excited to unveil a new 3-year subscription/renewal option, along with our 2010 Holiday Special. Folks who purchase a 1- or 2-year subscription/renewal will receive a decal, in addition to one extra issue for each year purchased (so, a total of 6 issues for a 1-year, and 12 for a 2-year). The decal will be included with the next issue to be published after the purchase (so either Winter 2010 or Gear Guide 2011). Purchasers of the 3-year will receive a free pair of Mountain Khakis. We will be emailing the codes for use on their online store about 1-2 weeks after you make the purchase, so you can get whatever color and size you want. For each of these offers, be sure to enter the coupon H2010 in the shopping cart after a qualifying item has been added (1-, 2-, or 3-year subscription/renewal).

Check out the most recent newsletter.

Overland Journal was selected by Pangolin Pictures and the SPEED Channel for their prime-time television series Dangerous Drives, which will be broadcast to 78 million households worldwide.

Overland Journal will be featured in episode 12, which was produced in December 2009, and documents the testing procedures Overland Journal staff use to evaluate vehicles and equipment. “Overland Journal has a reputation of conducting the most exhaustive and abusive equipment testing in the industry, which piqued SPEED Channel’s interest in following along on one of our trips” says Scott Brady. For the testing, Overland Journal’s Publisher, Scott Brady and Senior Photographer, Sinuhe Xavier traveled through 500 miles of Utah backcountry testing American Expedition Vehicle’s (AEV) Brute and new Hemi powered Jeep Unlimited in the worst snow condition recorded in 40 years. The route ascended to over 8,000 feet, where the team encountered 40 inches of snow at the summit, requiring winching and progress at times measured in feet per hour.

In addition to testing the AEV trucks, Scott and his team were evaluating tents from Nemo Equipment, clothing from Arcteryx. Exofficio and Mountain Khaki, Lightforce lighting, BFGoodrich tires, ARB suspension components and rack/awning combination, and recovery equipment from Viking Offroad and Warn. Scott’s vehicle was the popular Overland JK, built by the Jeep Skunkworks team with components from AEV, ARB, Adventure Trailers, Equipt Expedition Outfitters and Mobil1.

Scott Brady, the publisher of Overland Journal, recently had an eye opening experience with English food. We were on our way north out of London to visit some overland companies. We had set off very early, and by the likes of 8am we were famished and ready for some relief. Stopping in a small town off the motorway provided no obvious place for refreshment. The town seemed hardly awake and, grim morning that it was, we had to stop and ask for help. The only people we could find were a group of construction workers, and a particularly portly gentleman was happy to direct us to a local establishment for an ‘English breakfast’. To be fair to the English (I am one) English breakfasts can be stellar; this was not one of those. The fried bread had that slightly rancid taste accompanied by pure grease and no discernable flavor. Sort of like eating pressed lard. The sausage was similar to the fried bread; tasteless and greasy, though it was hot. The baked beans were from a can, so they were at least edible and the bacon was passable at the time. Twenty minutes later we both felt like we needed to visit the hospital. My insides were coated like the bottom of a frying pan the day after cooking a pound of bacon; that white congealed grease requiring a scoop to get rid of. Take away lesson was not to rely on large construction workers for dining advice and the parting comment from Scott; “I need to get my stomach pumped!”