Hi, for those of you who are new here, welcome to our weblog. It has been a while since I’ve posted any travel diaries in here but it was for a good reason! We were getting ready for a big journey. We are currently in the USA and started our journey to drive from the Arctic Ocean in the Canada to Alaska and then head south all the way to Ushuaia in Argentina. The Original route is called the Pan American Highway and has been driven by many overlanders throughout the years. To get a rough idea about the route, see the map below.
Preparation:
It took us over two years to get ready to embark on this journey. The first step was selecting the right car and finding one to buy. The next step was preparing the car for such an adventure. Amir documented all the building process for our rig in our website over the last two years. If you are interested, please start here. We tested the rig in a few trips in New Zealand and made final touches to make sure that we can live in it comfortably in different climates long term.
The next step was sorting out the financials to be on the road full time for a year. We’ll get into this through the trip in more details but we set up a target in savings and we hit the road as soon as we hit the target and the car was ready.
The final stage was arranging for the shipping and all the logistics involved with driving a car legally overseas.
It’s a detailed topic and the rules and regulations are changing constantly so I won’t go through the details here. If you need to ship a car from New Zealand to the USA or you just need information on the USA side, no matter where you are shipping from, please send us an email and we are happy to help.
In Summary, finding the right shipping line, shipping agents on both ends and understanding the rules and regulations, abbreviation that is used in marine transportation, which we had no idea about was the biggest challenge. On the USA side, we had to arrange the car insurance to be able to drive the car legally on the roads. All the unloading, custom inspection and clearance was done by our shipping agent on the USA side.
The timeline is really vague with the shipping. When the container departs and when it arrives, when it is custom cleared, it’s all based on estimates so it was a bit of planning and flexibility involved to arrive at the same time that the car was ready to be picked up. All we had to do was to pay the bill and get the keys of the car!
The Plan:
The car was shipped to the port of Oakland in San Francisco, the plan from here is staying for a few days in San Francisco with our amazing old friends and see the city, pack the car and get ready to hit the road. It’s spring time and depends on where we go we might get to the wild flower season in deserts or heavy snow in mountain passes.
We’ll try to put weekly updates on how it goes and where we are heading. Please subscribe down below to get a notification on the new posts.
Karen McManus
May 6, 2024 at 6:24pmSafe travels Amir and Azadeh, we hope to be in south America sept 2024 for a year, so we might see you on the road. If you see a Uk troopy with the same water filler cap and method of getting solar cables into the car, then it’s probably us – and we’d love to see you to thank you for your build blog info. Cheers Colin and Karen
Amir
May 8, 2024 at 11:28pmOh Karen so lovely to read this and we are happy our blog posts been useful for the community ! look forward to see you then lets be in touch Cheers
Kevin Tran
May 6, 2024 at 9:15pmGood luck Amir, hope you guys have a safe and enjoyable trip. What you guys doing now is always my dream. One day i will fulfill my dream. Love and respect from New Zealand. Kevin Tran, Auckland follower!!!
Amir
May 8, 2024 at 11:26pmHi Kevin appreciate for your kind message and all the best Cheers Brother
Michael Chernishov
May 7, 2024 at 9:21pmWow! That’s going to be epic!!! Can’t wait for the videos and blog posts!
Amir
May 8, 2024 at 11:28pmHi Michael appreciate brother, cheers