Driving a Tacoma around the world

I see that about the weather, it’s supposed to drop 30° here in Durango Colorado. No, we’re not yet heading south but will if we decide to stay in the US for the winter. We still can’t decide whether we should ship to England in November or wait a bit

 

This is awesome! Can't wait to follow you on your journey!
I work with a guy that rode a KTM adventure bike from Seattle to Rio for the FIFA world cup! Such a cool experience

 

Awesome! I’m enjoying watching this thread!

 

Any plans to come through South Carolina ?

 

thank you for your kind words. We’re excited and to be honest a little impatient to head overseas, though puttering around the US is fun

 

we may very well. We are planning on shipping the truck from somewhere from the East to Europe possibly as early as late this fall

 

Can’t wait to follow your journey. So much of the states left for me to explore with my little kids. This is a serious bucket list. love the passion!

 

thank you! We’re loving it! So far we’ve visited Nevada, Utah and have been impressed with both of them. Before this trip I’ve only driven the interstates crossing both, this time though we avoided them and found great little towns and lots of open spaces to wild camp. Truck and camper have been great!

 

That’s great. NM is my first trip planned. Meeting a friend from Gilbert AZ there. We met years ago when I lived in Chandler. Where in Nevada did you spend most of your time?

 

A stretch that we especially liked was Highway 305 from Battle Mountain to Austin and then took Highway 50 east over to Ely. Highway 50 crosses through cute towns like Eureka. East of Austin, we stayed at Hickison petroglyph Recreation area, free camping there.

 

GREAT info--- I heard good things about 305 in the past. Thanks!!

 

Two more mods to the truck have been completed on the road this week.



YES! Ive added a clear film on the hood showing all of the countries. We’ll draw our route on as we go

Since my wife and I are still working while on the road, it’s critical for us to have cell service so we have installed a Weboost Drive Sleek


It is supposed to boost cell phone signals by up to 23 decibels. Installation was pretty darn easy, the hardest part was bringing the antenna wire through the front firewall into the cab.

 

Nice! When you get to the actual edge of the world, please take a pic and post. Those round Earth people are just relentless in their nonsense.

 

That is awesome.

 

Here are some more detailed pictures of the weboost. I’ll be doing some testing out in the backcountry area and let people know how well it works

Here is the actual phone cradle. In order for the signal to be boosted your phone must be in here. Other more expensive weboost models allow for multiple phones to be hooked up in a local Wi-Fi as well as boosting the signal up to 50 decibels.


Here’s the weboost antenna pretty simple, sticks on with a magnet.


...and the amplifier. I chose to mount it under the passenger seat using the supplied sticky-backed Velcro.


Power supply is a simple cigarette charger. It’s nice that it provides a USB charger on top of it. I didn’t bother to hardwire it in because it does not work in outside of North America. Some of the hardest part of it was dealing with the extra wire which was coiled up out of the way under the carpet.

 

definitely inspiration! If we can do half of what they have done it would be great. I see that they interrupted their trip due to COVID, bummer

 

Interesting how life throws you curve balls. After leaving Colorado Springs we were planning on a simple night in the national forest west of Denver on our way up to Fort Collins. As we were leaving Colorado Springs on a Friday afternoon we headed into the mountains we decided to find a place to wild camp an hour west of Denver in the local National Forest. Ha!



After searching in vain for 3 hours on ioverlander, etc we gave up and stealth camped with our camper popped up at the top of a pass at 11,500’ (B on the map) figuring we’ll just get up early before anyone finds us. Little did we realize that we were camping in the parking lot at Guanella Pass which has the trailhead to the summit of Mount Bierstadt, one of Colorados easiest, thus most popular 14,000’ foot peaks. We arrived at 9 PM and there were eight cars in the parking lot. continuously throughout the night literally hundreds of cars came waking us up every 30 minutes to the sound of people getting ready to head to the summit. After little sleep, at daybreak we lowered the top and drove off amazed at the congestion of at least 200 cars parked up and down the road. A near continuous tinkle of head lamps lit up the path to the Summit. Sometime in the middle of the night we were even awakened yet again by a small group of Subaru WRXs who were racing up the road and pulled into the Summit parking lot to jabber. I agree that is an awesome driving road and evidently it’s so crowded during the day you have to do it at night if you want to have a road race.

Thoroughly disgusted with the absolutely packed National Forest land we headed away from the Denver crowds to Steamboat Springs and found a great site up a bumpy road to Buffalo Pass and camped at Summit Lake east of town.


Even here we followed 15 slow Toyota land cruisers on a drive. On a very windy, cool day we did a wonderful 9 mile round trip hike up to Gilpin lake.


I highly recommend it.


Our saga does not end. With a weekend waning and us needing to get to Fort Collins for reliable internet to work we headed off after the hike and then found two highways were blocked due to wildfire and couldn’t drive thru Rocky Mt National Park so we diverted through Wyoming and took a small road (Highway 130) to the Snowy mountains and camped there Sunday night at 10,500’, burrr! as we pulled in it was 38°, we finally found a place we’re there wasn’t crowds of people. Next morning it was 19 degrees! Our furnace got a good first test and kept the camper at at 50°. It came on about three times that night.

Finding this area was definitely a highlight of the weekend.

 

Where did you get the world map?
Signal boosters only work when there is a signal to boost. We have a Weboost in our home. Works about 90% of the time. When the tower we are aimed at goes down, signal goes to one bar and we can barely send a text message

 

Just got back from Colorado and Utah. Beautiful country out there.