Driving The Longest Continuous Direct Driving Route In The World

Allemaal de beste wensen voor 2023. Dat het maar een gezond en liefdevol jaar mag worden.

In January 2019 I found a Facebook advertisement of the APOD road trip to Vladivostok. For this trip you need a car that is capable to drive this distance and is older than 15 years (one of the regulations for the APOD).

This leads to a nice challenge, mostly 4x4 cars are equipped with a diesel (gasoil) engine. But here in Arnhem it is not allowed to drive in the city with a diesel engine older than 2005. So diesel wasn’t an option. I had to search for a petrol (and if possible a LPG/GPL) engine.

After searching in The Netherlands, without luck, I found the perfect car in Munich (Germany). According to the photo’s it was the perfect car in a good chape. So off to Munich. When arriving at the place of the car dealer, it turned out that het car was located in a open air storage with flat tires and a dead battery. And a lot of snow around.

The first impressions were good. There were some issues like rust, flat tires, broken windshield the dead battery, it still looked like the perfect car.

Finally in November the car was delivered at the garage of Pascal Auto’s in Huissen, close to Arnhem.

Now we were able to look better to the state of the car and checking all the parts of the car.

There was a lot more rust than expected. On some places the body was totally gone, on other parts you could loke from inside to under the car. But the engine was good and also the electric system didn’t have any problems.it also turned out that the car had belonged to a farmer in Romania. During the clean-up of the car I found corns of maize and wheat, nails and bolts, glass and lots of clay.

After one year of working on the body and the other parts of the car, it was time for the interior of the car.

When you’re working on an old car your best friend is YouTube. Here you can find almost all the answers to the problems of older cars. Also can you find a lot of ideas for your car or interior. So with this help most of the problems were solved. I found the ideas for my interior and started working on the interior in 2021.

In July the interior was ready and I also had a self-made roof rack on the car with a roof top tent.

Ready for adventure.

Entering Sagres. The last view kilometers to the official start of the journey.