The Landy

date: 2004-05-11
pos: chelmsford, england
author: staffan

As if destiny was pushing us to make this happen, the day after my meeting with Salim and Niklas, I found an ad on a brittish car trading website, announcing the sale of an expedition prepared Land Rover 110, to a very affordable price. We had been monitoring this site for months looking for a car for our journey but until then everything so far had been either out of our price range or not very suitable for a trip like this. A quick call to the owner confirmed that the car was fully prepared for a trip like ours and it was still for sale. Another very convincing fact was that it was standing in Chelmsford, only a half hour away from Stansted, the airport where I was having a stop-over on my flight back to Düsseldorf two days later.

(For clarity: I am currently living in Düsseldorf, Germany and I was back in Sweden, my home country, to meet up with Salim Mohammed from Kenya who at this time was visiting Sweden.)

I rescheduelled my flights to give me some extra time in England, went over to meet Dave Scott and his wife Penny who recently came back from a trip just like ours. They were extremely friendly and helpful and the car turned out to be everything that we hoped for, so after a 5 minute conference with Frank over the phone, we decided to make a deal.

Buying a car in England turned out to be not so easy when you're not living there and I must give a big Thank you to Dave's entire family who not only put me up for the night but basically involved everyone they knew who could help me in retrieving the right paperwork in order to export the car. I wish that more people could have this attitude towards strangers in need. I also want thank my sister Åse who played a big part in this rather unusual car deal.

Even with the best help in the world, my timespan of 24 hours was not enough to get all the necessary paperwork done so I had to leave England without the car but having paid a deposit and a promise to come back and pick it up a week later with all the papers in order. Those 24 hours probably shortened my life with about a year or so but at least I can now say that I know what it takes to export a car from England...

Next week I was back in Chelmsford to pick it up and this time we had done our homework and everything went according to plan. There were tears in Dave's eyes when he handed over the keys and I had to promise to take good care of the car. It's always a good sign for a car deal when you have to pull the keys from the previous owners hand. Maybe I'm exaggurating a little bit, but I know that Dave will be missing his Landy.

A quick trip to my sister Åse in Leicester and then heading for the white cliffs of Dover and the continent. It was a great promising feeling to steer our "Ship of Discovery" to its new home.

On the way back to Germany I learned a few things about Land Rovers. They may be the ideal vehicle to cross Africa but they are not the ultimate autobahn cruisers. At a total average speed of 70 km/h and a sound level equal to a low flying jet fighter, you arrive pretty tired at home after a 12 hour drive. The lack of speed is something that we can live with but the need for an intercom system in the car has to be eliminated.

I also learned that the U-joints in the propshafts of a Land Rover sometimes give up and that this creates a sound and a driving experience as if the whole transmission is about to collapse. I also learned that this is very easy and cheap to fix and that until you have the possibilty to do so you can just unscrew the whole propshaft and drive around with only 2wd.

I guess these are all things we have to get used to as new Land Rover owners...