Hazard Cleared
The first part of the theory test for the LGV licence is the Hazard test. I successfully negotiated my way around this with a score of 82 out of 100. Not brilliant but I lost concentration on one of the clips, that happened to be worth 10 points, and only scored 2. So the rest went pretty well.
The whole process was pretty weird. I turned up at the test centre in Southwark (well its London Bridge really) and there were various teenagers milling around – they have to do a theory test to get a car licence too. After checking in at the reception desk I was told to place my coat, bag and phone (turned off) in a locker. Then to my surprise I was also told to take my watch off and put it in the locker too – Not sure why this is – maybe they just want you to be totally unaware of how long you are waiting around !
Anyway was told to wait for a couple of minutes and then was called through and my identity was checked again – no chance to check in as one person and then for someone else to sit the test. I was also told at this stage that once in the test room there was to be no removing of clothes. Now I don’t know about you but I don’t tend to react to tests by getting naked – so what on earth are they trying to prevent you doing here ?
Once in the room you sit down at a computer and put some headphones on. Then its 25-30 minutes of watching clips of driving and clicking when you think there is a hazard.
After it’s all over you go outside, pick up your stuff, go to the front desk and they hand you a folded piece of paper which, in my case anyway, said “congratulations you have passed”.
The Course is Booked
I’ve now managed to book a five day LGV Cat “C” training course. Its 4 days of lessons followed by the test on the fifth day. The lessons are going to be 2 to 1 training. This means that there are 2 students to each instructor and you take it in turns to actually drive (1 hour on, 1 hour off). The advantage of this that you can watch the other guy and his mistakes and learn from them.
The company I am using is called EP Training and they are based in Addlestone, near Weybridge so not a million miles away from here. Its actually a pretty limited choice in South West London area and EP come highly recommended on Truck Net.
The total cost is £1,040 (if i pass first time) – they are claiming a 75% pass rate – so I’ll feel pretty bad if I fail.
They have managed to find me a cancellation so its only 2 weeks until the course starts – already feeling a bit nervous.
Checking Up On The Beast
Today we drove up to Suffolk again to check up on our truck and the works being done to it. The real reason for the trip was to deliver some things up to Ed (Overland Vehicles) for installation. The most important being a stereo so we can have some tunes on the road. Most of the camper systems are in now and the cabin is beginning to look much more homely. Nothing is yet ready to try yet which was a bit disappointing. However we can really get a feel for what its going to be like to live in the camper for 18 months now.
I know I’m going to have to control my messiness though or we could be looking at a divorce !
The Cab hasn’t been touched yet and that’s the next area on the agenda. But we are only about two weeks away from being ready to paint and probably five weeks away from it being fully finished.
Truck Driving…Here I Come..Well Almost
I’ve just got my provisional licence for C class trucks. That’s only seven days after putting my application in the post – pretty good efficiency from the DVLA. So you’d think I could go out and learn to drive now. But NO – two more hurdles to get through. I’ve got to pass a Theory Test and a Hazard Perception test before I can do that. The DVLA lets you book these online which is great – but massive downside is that you can’t do the two together. I did them both one after the other in the same sitting when I did my car tests so maybe its different for LGV. Anyway I now have two days in the diary over the next two weeks where I’m going to have to trek over to Southwark (it was either there or Kingston from this neck of the woods). Crossed fingers that this is pretty easy and just a formality – but I’d better have a look at the book and do a bit of studying.
New passport
Something you need to know about Sarah is that she has a bit of a compulsion to create order out of the chaos that I often leave in my wake. This has led to one very specific problem which has now happened three times. I go away somewhere involving a flight overseas, I come home and change clothes leaving my trousers in a pile on the floor. Sarah scoops them up and has them in the washing machine in what seems like seconds. The big problem, three times now my passport has been in the pocket.
Now I can tell you that passports and washing machines don’t mix very well. The first two times this happened my passport was completely ruined and I had no choice but to get a replacement straight away. The latest time my passport was a bit protected by the plastic wallet I’m now using to try to make it last a bit longer.
However I’ve only got about 15 pages left and we’re going to at least 15 countries possibly with multiple entries to some of them and the odd visa along the way. I reached the conclusion that I should probably get a new extended passport. The factor that made me pull the trigger though was that my old passport was a bit ripped and bits were washed out from it’s last pass through the washing machine. I figured that this is probably asking for trouble by some jobs worth customs guy at a border somewhere.
The process for a new passport is very simple. The form can be ordered online form the passport office – Form Download. This took only a few day to arrive.
You then have to fill in the form, get 2 passport photos and then get someone to verify your ID (and sign the back of one of the photos). You can then send it off or go to a post office and use the “check and send” service. Going via the post office costs £8.19 but it cuts the time taken down to 2 weeks from 3 weeks.
The real bitter pill here is the cost of a new passport – £77.50 for a standard passport but a whopping £90.50 for an extended one.
Driver Medicals
The first step to getting a LGV licence is getting a medical sorted. The required forms can be downloaded from the DVLA – http://www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/forms.aspx – and its the D4 form that is needed.
The medical itself has to be conducted by a doctor – makes sense of course. It seems straightforward but a quick enquiry of our local surgery and we found out that they wanted to charge over £100 for a medical for each of us. That seems like daylight robbery.
LGV training schools all want to sign you up and get you to do medicals through them – this just seems like a way to lock you in and get a margin on the medical to me.
Fortunately a little internet research and I came up with a company that specialises in doing medicals for those wanting LGV or PSV licences – www.drivermedicals.com . These guys only charge £52. Bargain – well relatively.
I booked one of these and the closest place was Tooting with a 10 day wait. When I went along the medical was done in a back room over the top of an opticians. It really only consisted of answering a few questions, a very quick eye test and having my blood pressure taking. Then the doctor signs off the form and you are done.
This enables you to take the next step and send off your old licence (photocard and paper) and the medical form (D4) to the DVLA and then the wait starts …….
One Small Problem
The Beast is being built and will be finalised in time for the trip and we have a quote to ship it over to Canada for around £3k. Expensive I know but we’ve got no choice with that.
There is one tiny little problem – to drive the Beast you need a category C licence – that’s an LGV licence (Large Goods Vehicle as they’re not called HGV’s anymore). The Beast is plated at 10 tonnes which puts it over the 7.5t limit of a C1 licence (which you get for free if you passed your test before 1997). Sarah’s got C1, I was a slow learner so I haven’t got even that. We could plate the Beast to 7.5t but once we were in it and so was our kit it would weigh over that so would be illegally overloaded – not actually overloaded mind because this is just a registration issue.
We’ve got to go through the process of taking another test. There are a bunch of steps to go through for a C licence:
- Get Forms from DVLA (helpfully they don’t have these at the post office)
- Get a Medical (this includes more comprehensive eye tests than required for a normal driving licence – you have to have a minimum in each eye)
- Apply for a Provisional Licence
- Apply for Theory Test and Hazard Perception test date
- Take Theory Test
- Take Hazard Perception Test
- Now you can finally get some driving lessons
- Take the Practical Test
- Pass and then send off for Shiny New Licence
So we’ve got three months to do all this. We’d better get started, not least because the recommended length of time for the driving lessons is five days.
Vehicle Choice
The Beast is pretty overkill for driving through North America, even for most of South America but we decided to buy this truck for a number of reasons.
The decision on which vehicle to buy went through a number of iterations. The key features that we wanted from whatever we bought were as follows:
4×4 – clearly most cars in all the areas we are going are not four wheel drive but we want the independence that this offers and the ability to go right off the beaten track if we wanted.
Permanent Bed – Right from the off we decided that most of our trip we wanted to be camping and right from the start Sarah said she didn’t want to sleep in a tent. A fixed sided camper then became the obvious choice and a permanently made bed allows you to drop straight into it after a hard day which seems infinitely better than having to rearrange everything to create a sleeping area.
Onboard Toilet – ok so we’re not slumming it but digging holes gets tired and once Montezuma’s revenge kicks in somewhere clean and private to suffer is worth its weight in gold.
Onboard Shower – again hardly bare bones travelling but a hot shower after a long day’s hiking is a real luxury and one that we will surely appreciate.
Those were really the key considerations in terms of the form factor. The second set of considerations were about where to make the purchase. The key factors here are registration and ultimately selling. Our initial thought was that the best place to buy was the USA as at the end of the trip we could ship back here and resell. However after a massive amount of internet trawling we discovered that this is very much easier said than done. The commonly held view of buying a car in the USA for roadtrip by a tourist is just not that easy. Each state differs in their rules but you have to have an address in the state you which to purchase in at the very minimum. However on top of this there are other rules. For example in California to register a car you must also have a California driving licence – or if you dig really deep in the small print on the DMV site – a California ID. This can be had if you have an address. In Washington you have to prove that you are a state resident and that is not just providing an address. So given all that we thought that arriving in the USA expecting to buy a car was a risky business.
We turned our attention to Canada. Here each state is again different. We focused on British Columbia where it does seem possible to buy and register a car as a tourist. The difficulty here is insurance. However this could work. The downside is having to sell in Canada at the end of the trip and probably in BC at that.
Given all this we wanted to buy our vehicle in the UK to make absolutely sure that we had it and could sell it easily at the end – or indeed keep it if we wanted.
So back to type of vehicle. At first we looked really hard at sportsmobiles. Now these things are cool. Proper 4 wheel drive and capable with it. But ultimately leads to pretty cramped living and no proper toilet or shower.
They do look cool though. They are also not available in the UK. So the next thought was to go with a pickup truck and slide in camper. We had almost decided that this was the way to go and had picked out a Ford F250 and a Northstar camper.
What put us off this combo was the fact that the truck is actually pretty overloaded in this configuration and conventional wisdom for overland travel is that you really don’t want your vehicle to be loaded to more than 80% of capability.
The other major factor is that these type of campers are made of really thin wood frames and have no protection from the truck under them shaking and twisting. So serious use off-road or on ripio (washboard) could cause them to disintegrate. The systems are also great for North American campsite use and some boon-docking but are not truly independent.
And the final nail in the coffin of this plan was the availability of trucks of the right size in the UK. They can be bought but they are expensive and only come up for sale irregularily.
It was purely by chance really that I came across a website where the original owner of the first Overland Vehicles Ltd produced truck was selling his after completing his trip in Africa. This led me to the website – www. overlandvehicles.co and after visiting Ed Perry, the head honcho, at his workshop in Suffolk I was sold.
What I’d really like is one of the flashy German built trucks. But these things are €500k and up. Look at this one below from Unicat (€388k + VAT secondhand).
I mean these things are undeniably cool – but how can you justify being outside of the Western world with something that valuable. We don’t want to slum it but these things are more luxurious than home. This things even got an espresso coffee machine and a full size washing machine.
Meet the beast
Beauty and the Beast
It’s not finished yet but “The Beast” is our vehicle of choice.
It’s an ex military Daf 4×4 flatbed truck. The conversion is being done by a company in the Uk called Overland Vehicles Ltd who have recently started creating expedition style campers.
The Specs:
Model: 45/150
Cab: Tilting. 1 + 2 seats. Stowage space at rear of cab
Config.: Permanent 4 wheel drive Logistics vehicle
Engine: Cummins 5900 cc 6 cylinder Turbo Diesel direct injection @ 145 hp.
Transmission: 5 speed gearbox and 2 speed transfer box with differential lock.
Steering: ZF Power assisted.
Brakes: Full Air System.
Body: steel drop side cargo body, removed before building.
Max. Payload: 4.2 Tonnes
This is what it would have looked like before the work started:
The box built on the back is going to be our home for 18 months and is an independent expedition style camper:
Body length in the region of 4.9m, width 2.5m.
‘Cut through’ to the cab.
2 x Double beds
Big worktop/food preparation area with ample storage space.
Ample seating (including 2 x forward facing seats with seatbelts) with table
Gas powered kitchen hob.
Compressor 12 volt fridge.
Big fresh water tank with effective filtration, smaller waste tank,
Big shower room with hand basin, shower and flush loo (cassette).
12 volt living area batteries with 24 to 12 volt and 240 to 12 volt charging. Mains hook up. Solar panels for trickle charging. LED internal lights.
LED side ‘under awning’ lights.
Eberspacker diesel powered hot water and internal heating.
Sprung cab seats.
Skylights/roof vents x 2.
Roofrack/viewing platform with rear access ladder.
External LED lights.
Big rear secure kit storage locker + O/S external storage locker.
Front mtd winch.
2nd spare tyre – rear mounted with small winch to aid storage.
Adaptor to inflate tyres from the main air brake system
Massive 340l fuel tank
Cab roofrack and windscreen protection bars
Interior with half real oak wall covering
All things start somewhere……
Well, all things have to start somewhere and this is the start of the next two years of our lives. We’re quitting our jobs, packing up our home and leaving the bright lights of London to head off on what will hopefully be, a real adventure… or what could just as easily be a complete disaster!
On the wrong side of 35, we felt it was time to kick back and have some fun, we’ve worked hard, now it’s time to play hard. Oh and by the way, “we” in case you are wondering, are Mark and Sarah, an English husband and a Welsh wife, surprisingly a winning combination, just don’t mention the rugby!
The plan is to drive the length of the Americas from the tip of Alaska to the southern most tip of Argentina, but in order to get there we have to start in Canada by shipping our ‘new home’ to Halifax on the east coast and heading North west before hitting Prudhoe Bay in Alaska and then turning around. We’ll end up in Ushuaia, with a cheeky trip to the Antartic before heading back up North to Buenos Aries and heading home – or going on – who knows.
With a bit of luck we’ll be off in June 2011 and expect to take at least 18 months. That makes home around the end of 2012/ beginning of 2013. Gutted to be missing the Olympics in London but we figured the trip should be worth it. There’s still 4 months until we go but the amount of planning and organisation it takes is huge, so we decided to start blogging now and share the trials and tribulations of our epic journey or unbearable slog. Fingers crossed!
FromAtoB 