Story by Andrew and Karen Taylor / Photos by Jeff Aronson

[Andrew and Karen Taylor, London, England, shared the beginnings of their around the world tour in a recent issue of The Rovers North News. With their trusty ’08 Defender 130 they’ve traveled across the US and Canada. Here’s the latest installment of their travels. –ed]

Hello US of A. After months of preparation, we finally arrived to start the next step in our adventure.

We took our UK registered 2008 Land Rover 130” to the USA and Canada so we could experience the diversity of the scenery that is on offer over here. The Land Rover proved to be the natural choice for the trip due to the large number of unpaved, logging and trail roads that cross the countryside, all of which are generally accessible to the public. Given the Land Rover would be our only transport and accommodation, we chose to avoid extreme off-roading. Still, the Rover afforded us the luxury of seeing some of the back country otherwise inaccessible to a camper van or worse, a rental car. During our travels we came across our fair share of washboard roads, boulder strewn areas, sand drifts and washed out roads. These roads offered challenging driving, we found we always needed to be prepared for what’s around the corner.

The Land Rover 130, nicknamed “Doobie Doo,” arrived in San Pedro Los Angeles and was unloaded from the container without any damage. Unfortunately we had neglected to disconnect the batteries for the transit. The resulting flat batteries started off our problems.



Incorrect jump starting of the Land Rover resulted in damage to the solenoid on the twin charging system. As a consequence of this schoolboy error the main battery drew a charge continuously and hence overheated. Initially, we put the foul smell down to the Los Angeles smog, but soon figured out the odor was that of an Optima Red Top battery slowly cooking itself.





Luckily we had made it to our first night stop, although we did contemplate just getting on an aeroplane and going home. A local RV shop in Ventura, CA, fixed the problem quickly. Day One also saw us take a wrong turn into one of the least salubrious areas of LA, run a red light in central Beverly Hills, and pay $25 dollars for 30 minutes parking at an alleged scenic beach just outside LA. Things settled down and we began truly enjoying the adventure of a lifetime.

Our route to date has seen us cover 12,000 miles in the Western USA and Canada. From Los Angeles we headed north to Vancouver, across British Columbia to Alberta and the Canadian Rockies. Along the way, we have headed back inland to visit the numerous National Parks that dot western America, and enjoyed a month’s stay in Colorado. As well as hitting the big name parks such as the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Yosemite in California, the Moab area in Utah and the Canadian Rocky Mountains, we have visited many other parks that, being Scottish, we had never heard of: Lassen, Olympic, Mount Rainier, Zion, Bryce. It is hard to pick one particular state or park that we could say was our favourite, as all have been truly spectacular for their own unique reasons. In reality, we could fill a book just trying to describe the marvels of any one of the parks or states.

The final leg of our USA and Canada trip saw us drop back into Montana before heading down to Yellowstone National Park; from there we headed east. When we arrived in Maine, we found a tire store recommended to us by East Coast Rover in Rockland, ME. There we spent time meeting up with the East Coast Rover staff and Rovers North News Editor Jeff Aronson.

Now we’re off for a month’s respite in northern New from New York to the UK, and we’ll head off to New Zealand and Australia for Christmas. Unfortunately, the cost of shipping and importing the Land Rover to New Zealand for a two month period has proven prohibitive, so we’ll have to say good bye to the Land Rover a little earlier than we had initially planned.

While traveling, we split our time equally between camping, motels and rented accommodation. A year living under canvas may sound fun, but it is impractical when you are staying at 10,000 feet in Colorado in May and you are still surrounded by snow, or when you want to see the highlights that San Francisco or any other major city has to offer. We have, however, found ourselves saying strange things when camping like, “Isn’t this great, we should do more camping,” then it rains for two days and we are glad to get back to the comfort of a motel or an apartment and indulge in the luxury of a hot bath.

When we set out on our adventure, we thought it would be about the spectacular scenery and the National Parks. Yes the scenery is, to use that overplayed word, “awesome”, but the reality is that the trip has not been about the scenery at all. The truth is that the trip has been about the people we have met on the road, in the stores, at the gas station and in the campgrounds, all of whom have their own interesting stories to tell. The Land Rover has been a true ambassador and instigator of much conversation, some of which has resulted in true friendships that will endure long after the Land Rover’s chassis has rusted beyond repair. Without such an iconic vehicle to kickstart memories of ownership from years gone by, or evoke thoughts of adventures crossing the African plains, we truly believe we would not have met a tenth of the people we have, had we elected to do the trip in a white camper van.

While we started this trip cynical about the Land Rover’s reliability, and questioned our own sanity for actually bringing the Land Rover Defender to the USA and Canada, we can advise now that we are true converts to such a significant piece of automotive history, which has proved itself reliable, exciting and capable of anything.

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