I’m painfully aware that it’s been too long since my last post. Things got away from me somewhat and, while I have some posts almost ready to go, there didn’t seem to be a way to get back into the blogging saddle as events outpaced my ability to keep up with them. But enough defeatism. I’d like to return to the keyboard so I need to start somewhere. It might as well be where we are now and there could be the patter of tiny blogposts from months gone by arriving in inboxes in the coming weeks.

From an armchair, long-term overland travel may appear as a sumptuous buffet of geographic choices; should it be that stretch of sun-bleached deserted coastline…

…or perhaps through verdant mountains to that impossibly beautiful hidden valley?

Or that romantic city we’ve never been to with the enticing alleyways and restaurants?

Sometimes it is like that. But sometimes it’s just about parts.

September is typically the time we set off on a new journey in Arnie, full of the joys of er, autumn. We’ve been on the road for two years now and in that time we’ve learned the prime Overlanding rule that “when we plan, God laughs”. We usually spend much of August back in the UK, while the German factory that built Arnie tackles any issues or necessary upgrades we’ve identified in our newish truck while travelling. Over summer we plotted the next leg of our trip, juggling our limited Schengen time (thanks Brexit), family commitments, weather, budget, long-term parking options near airports, oh and that geographic buffet I referred to earlier. We want to head east, through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey (or Türkiye as I see it is now), before metaphorically loading our camel and heading off onto the Silk Road next year. So flights booked, bags packed, we prepared to rejoin Arnie a couple of weeks ago, when we first heard the sound of a Deity chuckling gently somewhere in the ether.

One of the factory to-do list items was the replacement of the rubber bellows between the bit we drive and the bit we live in.

The bellows keep the dust out while allowing the two parts of Arnie to move independently over rough terrain. The original rubber kept trying to make a break for it whenever we went seriously off-road. I don’t blame it really, some of those tracks were fairly intimidating. I tried to order the rubber from the only German company that has it in the right size and received a curt email from the company owners saying they’d been in business for 62 years (!) and had earned the right to take some time off. They wouldn’t be back from a holiday in Spain until early September and only THEN, if we asked nicely, would they send us the rubber. We pushed the flights back.

The other summer job was tracking down tyres after the major blowout we had on a German autobahn.

To be fair, the tyres have had a tough life, carrying us through North African deserts, Albanian mountain tracks and Icelandic ash-fields.

But there are precisely three kinds available for a truck our size, weight and 4×4 ability. One is the tyres we already have which may, it seems, be prone to sidewall blowouts (and won’t be available until November even if we wanted them). Another is only available in Asia and the third are so popular they are completely sold out across Europe. I managed to get the last one in Germany. So we need four more, which should be available at the end of the month. In Britain. Anyone else hear that behind-the-hand heavenly sniggering?

Well we need new tyres, so that means re-calibrating our eastwards autumn route and turning it into more of a due westward sort of journey to pick up tyres in the UK. But we are running out of Schengen time (90 days in any 180 day period). So to get to the non-Schengen shelter of the Balkans we’ll need to bolt back across Europe. We’ve devised a reality-tv style multiple-ferry journey from Portsmouth to Santander, Barcelona to Rome and Ancona to Split which should get us into Bosnia just before the Schengen-day deadline, with hopefully some tread left on those new tyres. If they fit.

Ah yes about that (open guffawing and finger-pointing from on-high now). It turns out while the tyres we want that everyone loves and are on order in the UK are exactly the same technical dimensions as the ones we have now, they aren’t necessarily the same size. They may be physically slightly too big to fit properly in our front wheel-wells. We won’t know until we fit one. We’ll have to test-fit the spare. So here we are in Germany with no idea really, where we’ll be going next. I’m still looking longingly at the buffet though.