What the hell is this?

They say that when an automobile dies, it goes to the great big graveyard in the sky.

Sometimes, just before that happens, it gets found and taken for a balls-to-the-wall adventure, combining nature, grease, duct-tape and hilarity.  We call it one last trip.

So, where did the idea come from?

Pretty simple… take two geeks, tired of taking boring city breaks, who both share a love of road trips, mechanics and rally… add in a desire for adventure, the unknown and risk… throw in people’s desire to get a few pounds from old junk that is past its best.

Okay… so what does it involve?

Let me invoke bullet points:

• Pick a location.
• Browse ebay looking for a vehicle that costs less than £150, and has enough Road Tax and MOT to cover the planned trip, and that is within 100 miles or so of the location.
• Do all the due-diligence to make sure that we’re not buying something stolen.
• Buy the vehicle.
• Plan out an itinerary to get us to where the vehicle is, and a route taking us through the most beautiful parts on the way back and combining all the challenges we can come up with for our trips.
• Drive from where we bought the vehicle back to home, sleeping in tents along the way, eating undercooked burgers, and fixing things with duct-tape and epoxy.
• If the vehicle still has life in it (if we found one with a long MOT), relist it on ebay in its new location so someone else can get a little use out of it.  If not, drive her to our designated scrap-yard and say thank you and goodbye.

Okay, that’s great… what if you don’t make it that far?

Well… we’ve considered this, and, we’ll do our very best to get from wherever we bought the car, along our route, and back to home.  If worst comes to the worst, and pistons get shot through the cylinder head, then we’ll find a local scrap yard to deliver it to and hitch-hike our way home.

Whatever happens, it will be epic, there will be pictures, there will be video, and we’ll even have a live GPS map showing our progress.

That sounds cool… do you plan to do trips more insane than just within the UK?

Definitely.  Right now, we’re getting to grips with what we’ve let ourselves into.  Doing test-runs, if you will.  Building that perfect tool-bag of spare parts and duct-tape so we can fake it when we need to.  Eventually, we plan to pick a location, fly there, find a car locally without use of the internet, and then drive that back to home.

This sounds great for you… does anyone else benefit?

Hell yes!  What we’d love to do is incorporate this somehow with getting emergency vehicles out to charities in eastern europe who need them.  We’re not going to commit to that until we know that we can fake it well enough to get a normal-family-vehicle hundreds of miles through thick and thin though.

So, what’s with the paypal donate button?

Let’s be honest… providing hilarious entertainment, videos, stories, and facing peril at every turn isn’t cheap.  We’re not rich either.  If people donate, we can go on more crazy trips, and half of everything donated we will give to charities of our choosing.  Think cancer research, AIDS awareness, that kind of thing.

We’d like to think that somehow, through all the cuts and bruises, the nights working on a car while it’s raining, on the top of a mountain outside of a cell tower’s coverage, we might actually be making a difference.

Also, every trip we run will be tied in with a sponsorship page, so you can sponsor us to complete it, and everything you give will be sent directly to charity.  Just like running a marathon, only more hilarious.