The first time we drove Arnie was March ‘24; a damp motorway slog from Germany back to the UK to get the paperwork sorted. Registering a personally imported vehicle is a subject for a whole other blog post (if I can deal with the PTSD of revisiting that particular chapter).

While we worked through that process we also did some some fitting out – installing grocery shelves, filling the storage hatches with chairs and tools and other bits and pieces to make Arnie properly ours.

I had a long list of things to do to satisfy the UK inspectors.

After much tinkering and THREE inspections The DVLA told us it would take another six weeks to get the log book, during which time Arnie still had German plates. There were a number of things we wanted the factory to do to get Arnie “expedition ready” so I drove back to Göppingen and dropped Arnie at the factory while we waited for the UK paperwork to come through.

On July 23rd 2024 – our wedding anniversary – it did. As I could think of no better anniversary present than a morning at the local car spares shop, P and I hotfooted it up the Holloway Road. My wife is a lucky woman…

Neither of us had paid particular attention to what the actual license plates were going to be until the guy handed them over and the coincidence of the Listers July 23rd anniversary seemed almost spooky.

So we had the paperwork and we also had a name: Arnie. I’d never thought much about naming vehicles, but after we bought “Harvey the RV”, it became a Thing.

For the three years it took from order to pickup, neither of us knew how to refer to this big vehicle we were waiting for. “The truck” made it sound like some sort of 18 wheel juggernaut. A “Campervan” is clearly a VW bus, an “RV” suggests an American camper the size of Wales. We needed a name which gave an impression of beefiness, but with hidden depths and perhaps a nod to its Teutonic origins.

Of course both P and I were each adamant that we’d come up with “Arnie”. In a bid to prove my claim I confidently searched my WhatsApps and found the very first reference in a message from Philippa.

So thanks Jane!

Now it was time to go back to Göppingen and finally, finally get going. On August 15th it was “Pickup II – This Time For Real”

After years of planning and saving, bad luck, false starts, lucky breaks and pig-headed blind optimism, we were about to start doing the actual thing we’d set out to do. As we pulled out of the factory it dawned on us that, almost unbelievably, we had a self-contained expedition truck which we could use to travel, well, anywhere (geopolitics permitting). That fact on its own has had us both staring blankly through Arnie’s windscreen at times, unable to quite process how our lives have shifted. We’ve both lived in London a long time and we haven’t left it forever, but giving up the routines and rhythms of a settled life for one which changes every day takes some getting used to.

We still have lovely family in the UK of course but undoing the other knots which hold you in place is a little daunting. One by one we’d unpicked them and now we were floating away and enjoying the view.

So where to go first? Well, a shakedown trip. Jungles and deserts could wait. First we needed to get used to driving a five and a half tonne truck and make sure everything worked.