Celtic Rover
Nelson is on his way !
After been driven the 7 hours to Felixstowe harbour Nelson is on his way loaded into a container organised by Martin at IVSS UK who is also the main admin on the Overland Sphere websites, his day job these days is organising shipping our trucks around the world – which he does very well.
So hopefully in 20 days or so, hurricanes permitting, I will be reunited with Nelson in Cartagena Colombia and will face the first challenge of the trip, getting him through customs, insured and legally on the road.
Another handy feature of the design is that the roof box fits exactly into the space in the rear of the Landy, actually a bit to exactly as I forgot about the protruding door handle when I specified the box and so it has to be removed for the door to close !
This is a picture of Nelson and his new home, as you can see he has been engineered specifically to fit inside a standard shipping container with only 4cm to spare on the roof as long as I take the roof box off.
He is secured by strong ratchet tie downs to the anchor points on the back and the front which were added for just this purpose and for towing out of trouble, these mountings are 5te rated each so more than man enough for the job and are directly fixed onto the main chassis so very easy for the guys at the port to access and use. They also nailed down metal cups to hold the wheels in place so all together they should keep the truck secure, my battery isolators also came in very handy as it saved me the trouble of disconnecting the wiring for the battery.
In total the shipping cost about 2K with some additional fees still to be paid at the port in Colombia. On the positive side I was able to blow my 250k worth of KLM air miles and got my flight to Colombia, back from Santiago and return for Christmas for about 500 GBP all in!
For the next few weeks I have a packed schedule, a few days working in Germany on a small training project that will cover the full costs of the six months away is the first priority and has just been completed as I write this in Ireland. I am here as my Mum has just had a hip replaced so I am doing a stint as nurse and butler for her here, which is great as I will not be around for a while so I can help her for a week or so before I go and my other brothers and sister step in to help again.
Apart from that and a Spanish lesson I have business accounts to put in order before I go and a garden to “winterise” as I am really the only gardener in the house so I am hoping a good tidy up will see it through to March when I return. There were masses of checklists to work through before Nelson went away, the image below was from the last main kit checking exercise
