Tah-dahhh!!! Today, 6th February 2019 marks our fifth anniversary on the road, living full-time in Cuthbert. Happy Anniversary to Us 😊. After taking delivery of Cuthbert from Bocklet and giving up our jobs in December 2013, we spent January 2014 fitting him out with our stuff and preparing for our new life on the road. Finally, on the morning of Thursday 6th February 2014, we left UK on the Eurotunnel for a shake-down trip around Europe.
Five years, 167,000 km, 46 countries on four continents later… here we are in Oaxaca, Mexico… watching from afar as our homeland implodes in the midst of Brexit muppetry and mayhem. Here’s a short video of Cuthbert’s highlights over the last five years. Grab some popcorn and enjoy!
Wonder-When Windscreen
Coincidentally, today also marks exactly two months since we arrived in Oaxaca. We came up from the Pacific Coast on 6th December 2018 in the optimistic, but it turns out – sadly misguided, expectation of receiving a new windscreen before Christmas. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!! What a palaver it has been. We have some tentative hope that the whole sorry tale will soon be ‘Happily Ever After’, but this is not the first time we have thought this. So we won’t tempt fate. We’ll tell the full story when… if ever… it’s over.
XZL Tyred-Out
Meanwhile, in other news… we’ve had great success with receiving a full set of new tyres from Europe. Thanks to a marvellous service from Michelin, our XZL tyres were shipped from Europe and delivered to the door of our campsite in El Tule, Oaxaca. At the time we ordered, the XZL tyre was not only unavailable in the Mexican market, it was not even officially approved for import and sale here. Michelin imported the tyres for us, then went through the process of having the XZL tyre-type homologised (officially approved) for sale and use in Mexico, before delivering to us. A great service and one which will hopefully benefit other users of the excellent XZL off-road tyres (click here for details on our XZL tyres-story to date).
Anyway… windscreen permitting… we hope to be hitting the roads of Mexico again soon. We’ve had a lovely break here at Overlander Oasis in El Tule just outside Oaxaca. Calvin and Leanne are great hosts and made us very welcome for an uncertain and undetermined time. The climate is lovely, the town is attractive, local food is great… we’ve even been here for the amazing fiestas of El Tule which we’re really pleased to have seen: crazy kids running around the town square with papier mache hats, covered in exploding fireworks. Seriously… these were well worth hanging around for! Full fiesta story to follow soon!