You know the greeting you get when you pick up your dog that had to spend a few days at the vet. Tail wagging! Peeing a little! Wiggling all over! Where have you been? I knew you wouldn’t leave me, but you were gone soooo long!
We are reunited with our little companion, the Wee Rover!!!!!!!
My boy and the Wee rover are both happy, again.
Tidbit: It is the same greeting we get every time we visit our good friend Sheba next door (she’s a dog, just in case you thought we had a human friend who peed everytime we saw them😁
The Wee Rover has been an amazing patient. Her old heart is out, the new motor is in and she is doing great under the excellent care of Dr. Fred! Now to fine tune her new bling 😁.
D figured while we were hanging here we should take advantage of our down time and replace the rear brakes; he was planning on installing new rear drums and shoes prior to leaving, but we ran out of time and it kept snowing and snowing and snowing. Since we will soon be Turbo Charged, good braking is a bit essential!
45 minutes later and fancy new rear brakes are installed!
Once we install the new motor we will be ready to vroom and screeeeeech:)
Old brakes
New shoes
New drum – now don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about!
We got a couple of things done on the Wee Rover while we have been living on the Oregon coast.
Our odometer gave up the ghost on a dusty road in the Yukon. This coupled with the fact that google maps only works with cell coverage pushed us to purchase a GPS! We found the cheapest, highest rated, Garmin on Amazon and ordred it up. We now have odometer, speedometer, and mapping for North, Central, and South America. Such modern technology!)
Navigation…now we don’t have an excuse for getting lost, yea right, we’ll still get lost.
Odometer, speedometer, and who knows what else, maybe it even bakes cookies…ok wishful thinking.
D had rebuilt the front axles prior to leaving on the trip, but had not installed a steering stabilizer. We added one just to help in the off road sections coming up as we head south to Baja. For a quick taste of our future route, check out the “Baja Divide” trail. We can’t wait!
Brand new steering stabilizer, the nice clean thingee under there😁
Many have asked us “If you had to pick one thing that bugged you over the past 4 months on the road, what would that be?”
Darrin’s, no hesitation, hands down, response goes something like “The Rover has been totally awsome as a travel vehicle, but it was built for a different era. An era before superhighways and 80 mile per hour speed limits across the plains”
The little Rover, even with the 2.5 liter, is vastly underpowered for the load and terrain when coupled with today’s speed limits. The road from Anchorage to Denali with too many impatient RVs and tour buses to count was the breaking point!
The Rover needs a heart transplant! A New motor.
We have chosen the Mercedes Benz OM617 3L Turbo Diesel due to the availability of a conversion kit for the Rover.
The OM617 is considered to be one of the most reliable engines ever produced with engines often reaching over 1,000,000 km without being rebuilt and is one of the key reasons for Mercedes’ popularity in North America in the 1980s. The engine is entirely mechanical in its systems; there are no electronics, wires, chips, at all. Essentially, you could jump start the engine with no battery and it could sit there running, under water, until it ran out of fuel. The price for this reliability is a bit lower MPG, as the mechanical systems are not as fine tunable as the electronic systems found in todays cars.
Old Motor:
Chevy 2.5L
90 hp 133 ft-lbs
New Motor:
Mercedes 3.0L OM617 Turbo Diesel
150 hp 220 ft-lbs
New England to Florida to the Arctic Ocean to Prince William Sound and our ferry south.
We have traveled through eighteen states and three Canadian provinces. The temperatures have ranged from 95 to 45 degrees, with rain, snow, hail, more rain, and baking hot sun. We have seen amazing mountain ranges, glaciers and glacial lakes and crossed the mighty Yukon River a bunch of times. We swam everywhere possible including the Yukon and Klondike Rivers…okay we single dunked in the Klondik…brrrrrr. We have camped in state parks, city parks, gravel pits and on river banks. We dipped our toes in the Arctic Ocean and crossed the Arctic Circle four times. We spent weeks in the far north where the sun doesn’t set and your brain gets a bit fuzzy from lack of sleep. We have been lucky enough to spot wolves, grizzly bears, black bears, lynx, artic fox, musk ox, moose, caribou, sea otters, sea lions, harbour seals, too many cool birds and wild flowers to list and mosquitoes that I could have put a saddle on and ridden. We have met amazing people and found a few new friends.
A few weeks ago we were in Eagle, AK and it was 90+ degrees. We heard the distant rumblings of thunder and in need of some heat relief, and as usual in need of a shower, we did a little impromptu rain dance…it didn’t rain. We took our bar of biodegradable all natural soap and went dipping in the brook.
Unbeknownst to us, our rain dance must have had a delay built in. Fast forward a few weeks and all it wants to do is rain, including the remnants of a typhoon hitting Alaska as I type. We aren’t complaining, we did have 2 beautiful days that gave us a glimpse of her majesty, Denali. A rare treat!
We have also been saying that we needed some down time. We have been traveling too much, and 3 weeks above the Arctic Circle in 24 hour sunshine does something screwy to your noggin, well screwier, we already have quite a few bolts loose. We now have had days and days of down time to read, play cards and chess and take naps. Again, we aren’t complaining…I’m reading a great fantasy book full of dragons and mages and such.
Moral of the story: Be careful what you wish for! Take what life on the road gives you and be thankful:)
Exhibit A: This is a little flooded brook in our campground. All of the rivers in our area are at ‘bankfull’ according to the Special Weather Statment. I’m not sure what that means, but I don’t think I’ll be dipping my toes to find out.
Exhibit B: Another gushing stream in our campground. This was barely a trickle a few days ago. Just in case you can’t tell, I have on 2 ibexs and a heavy wool coat under my rain coat!
Exhibit C: There isn’t anything there…
Just a reminder of what’s supposed to be there…
Exhibit D: The soggy wee Rover and a soggy Darrin cooking our dinner. Notice our neighbors in full rain gear.
They say it is a small world and we can vouch that that is true. We are consistently running into people we have seen in other places. We have run into 1 family so many times their young kids come running up to us now like we are old friends!
2 recent stories stand out.
The first happened in Fairbanks. We were sitting in a restaurant having breakfast (our first meal out in months) when a woman comes over and starts telling us how she saw us up on the Dalton Hwy. It turns out, she was riding in one of the oversized big rigs we pulled off the road to let past. She saw us drive into the restaurant and had to come over and tell us how much she loved our rig. We were almot 500 miles from where she had seen us. What a memory.
The second happened just the other day here in Denali State Park. We were sitting under the awning enjoying a bit of nice weather when a rig pulled in a few spots down and the guy came running over to tell us he had a picture of our Land Rover on his phone. It turns out a good friend of his, Mike, had camped next to us at the Ponca State Park in Nebraska. Darrin and Mike had hit it off talking about cars and such and Mike had sent a picture of our rig to his buddy back home in Iowa. What are the chances that guy from Iowa would turn up here in Alaska in the same campground we are in?
A special starter was included to fit with the adaptor.
A custom oil pan is required to clear the rover front differential and to fit in the engine bay.
