IN THE BEGINNING

We originally had not planned to retire and start our dream for another couple of years. For something to do Wayne would quite often search for expedition trucks for sale and send them to Elizabeth. Most of them were not even close to what we wanted, being very old, or too quirky or primitive for the way we wanted to travel and live. 

By chance he came across a website Expedition Trucks and they had a truck that was very close to what we were looking for and it appeared to be in very good condition. He sent this to Elizabeth and, assuming it was another ‘joke’ email, it was duly ignored. Eventually when she got round to reading it, it was agreed that with a few alterations the truck would be close to our ideal vehicle and it was significantly less than what we were expecting for a much better truck. 

We reached out to Arno from Expedition Trucks, who was really helpful (we would highly recommend these guys if you are in the market for a truck) to see if the truck was still available and what the process would be to try to purchase it. Rightly so he told us we would be best to confirm that we could purchase, register and drive this on our Australian licences. (For the details on how as Australians we managed this, see this post). Alas by the time we got all the required information together and had started to speak to the seller someone had beaten us to it and it was sold. The truck to the right is the actual one we nearly bought.

The truck in question had been built by Krug Expedition and as a part of the discussion we had been introduced to Dmitriy. Our discussions now moved on to having a truck built specifically for us. Sooo many questions arose, with the most important one being whether we could actually afford to do this NOW!?!? And so in November 2017 we began our discussions in earnest and the journey to build Matilda commenced.