The Beginning

In 1992/93 we did an overland trip from Morocco in the North of Africa to the South of Africa. It turned into a backpacking trip when we could not get our vehicle into Algeria. We made it to South Africa, but had to fly over certain countries where we couldn’t get entry visas or were considered off limits at the time. Our gear consisted of a 1.5 person tent (everything had to be as light as possible), a “bluey” stove with 2 pots, kitchen condiments that fit in a tea-tin, some assorted clothing, sleeping bags, and bad-ass hiking boots. This was the start of our travel bug.

Moving right along to 2013-14, when we went on an 18 month trip around the world in Sterlin, our much loved Land Rover Discovery. For the occasion he’d been kitted out with an ARB roof top tent with annex, awning and bug screen, water tank and filter and a whole storage system in the back, built from IKEA’s Ivar shelving system. From LA we shipped Sterlin to Down Under, onto KL, Malaysia for months of fun in South-East Asia; through China to Mongolia, Central Asia, Russia, into Europe via Finland all the way to Café De Kabouter in Eeklo.

During that trip, we’d started looking into ‘enhancing’ the camping and road trip experience, as in: making it more comfortable. Specially I’d had it with getting up in the middle of the night, finding my shoes (checking them for creepie-crawlies), climbing down a ladder, watching out for possible animals – wild or other, blah blah blah.

On that trip we saw all sorts of overlanders with cars and trucks in various sizes. We started looking, and mostly drooling over, all manner of overland trucks. One always stood out to me: someone (I believe it was our artist neighbor Mike Kimball) sent me a You Tube promotional video of some Australian truck called Earthcruiser. I immediately liked the compactness and openness of the interior design (wasn’t too fond of the ‘blonde’ always combing her hair though). Over the next few years we looked at all manner of overland vehicles and trucks and started dreaming that that might be just what we’d like to travel in… you know: toilet, shower, kitchen,….  We discovered that Earthcruiser by then also had a factory in Bend, Oregon… Ha! Now not only was that worth looking into, it also put them well within our reach – distance wise.

We settled back into San Francisco life and overland trucks were talked about fairly regularly. Slowly a clear favorite started emerging: The EarthCruiser.

In August of 2017 we headed to Sisters, OR, to watch the total Solar Eclipse with friends. We rocked up to our spot from where to watch the eclipse and lo and behold, two EarthCruisers were parked there. As luck would have it, one of these EarthCruisers was owned by Michelle and Lance, the owners of EarthCruiser USA (Bend really isn’t that far from Sisters). Before that we’d ever only seen one other EC in the wild and then from the outside only, so not only was it really nice to see one up close and inside, it also convinced us that that would eventually be our vehicle of choice. At that time however, in our minds, we were still 3-5 years away from even thinking about purchasing an EC.

A few weeks later during dinner with good friends Steve and Terry, life and things were pondered and discussed and ‘why wait, you never know what life has in store’ came up more than once. We’d seen the light on August 21st and were slowly beginning to realize it.

Find out more about EarthCruiser USA.

Our neighbours during the Solar Eclipse.