One day, a friend introduced me to overlanding.   After dong some research, I came across the Bell family's stories.  I read all of Grahams's books and found a ton of inspiration in their pages.  It was literally the Bell family's story that gave us the final push to get rid of everything and hit the road full time.  My wife and I always planned to travel the world full time when we retired, but the Bell family was the first to show us that it was possible to do it with the whole family.  There are many others doing the same thing, but if it hadn't been for them, I'm not sure how long it would have taken us to muster up the courage to leave it all behind.  If you are on the fence about doing something similar, I highly recommend their books.

Some of his books are absolutely fascinating. I suggest reading a couple if you ever get a chance.

They were visiting our friends Overland Anatolia in Turkey to get some work done in their Landy. They had heard about Overland Anatolia from a friend of ours on our Morocco Trip the previous year who we had sent to Overland Anatolia when they needed help in Turkey and they in turn had passed on the details to Graeme and Luisahen they were headed east.The long distance overland community is very small in comparison to the likes of Overland Bound community but we are all connected by a shared experience.

So it was great to actually meet-up with A2A. We spent the first night camped outside the garage on an industrial estate (this is quite common for long distance overlanders) as we helped out with their repairs. The next night we all camped and bbq’d in the car park at the home of Overland Anatolia and the third night we headed to a remote beach and pitched up for a great A2A braai.

Great people with great children living a life many of us can only dream about, overcoming many obstacles as they go.