Insurance

Most of the places that we are going insurance is easy. You buy it at the border – its a form filling exercise with no real expectation that it provides any value.

However Canada and the USA are a serious exception to this (and Mexico). You need insurance otherwise you are illegal. I am expecting to be stopped by the cops at some stage and they will ask to see our insurance papers. So there is no choice here, but getting insurance is not that easy.

I started off by trying to find a US insurance company that would be happy to take us on. They pretty much universally said that they couldn’t insure a UK registered vehicle. OK so I’m thinking that this might be a problem.

Then I went to UK insurers. I got back a number of responses but the gist of them was encapsulated neatly by the reply from one of them “We wouldn’t know where to start”.

This was now presenting a serious problem, but I knew that what we were doing wasn’t unique. I did some serious web searching and managed to find two insurance companies that work with overlanders and therefore would be potentially helpful.

These are:

www.thuminsurance.com

www.alessie.com

Both of these were helpful initially but Alessie ended up not responding to my queries although they had indicated they would make an offer.

However fortunately Andrea Nelson at Thum (andrea@thuminsurance.com) was absolutely great. Once we had gone through a few hoops in providing pictures of the Beast and a bit of information then Andrea offered to insure us. They only problem is that it is pretty expensive at USD 1700 for 6 months insurance in both Canada and USA (although this is fully comprehensive).

In the end we didn’t have much choice and time was running out but at least we are now insured. Thanks very much for all your help Andrea.

There is another potential insurer in Germany that I have heard about but I didn’t approach them (www. tourinsure.de)

The insurers that my internet research suggested might be helpful but that weren’t were:

• Explorer RV – explorer@explorerrv.com
• Campbell Irvine – info@campbellirvine.com
• Stuart Collins -mail@stuartcollins.com