In 2018, Andy plotted a rough route out on the Furkot program one continent at a time. It totaled 150,000 miles covering 100 countries. We were thinking it would take 3 to 5 years.

Now, three and a half years in to our journey we have some updates. We spent our first year and a half on the road traveling the US and Baja, Mexico (our eventual goal is to visit every US national park, right now we are at about 45 out of 63) It started out as a way to kill time as the global pandemic had sidetracked our plans a little. Turns out the truck was the perfect isolation vehicle and visiting lesser known national parks was great fun. We also got to work out all the kinks of life on the road, getting our systems organized, in a country where we spoke the language and knew how to find things. As soon as the post COVID world opened up in 2021, we drove across the US and put the truck on a ship to Liverpool, England.

We spent over a year traveling Europe. We decided to add in a month in Iceland which is not shown on our original route (we are so glad we did! it was a travel highlight for us). We had visited Italy, Spain and Switzerland so mostly skipped them this time round.

Daily costs for the two of us in Europe averaged $101 a day with gas being the highest expense at $46 per day followed by groceries at $19. We tend to drive a lot, our restlessness combined with a constant eagerness to see the next thing means we usually move on daily (although we try to drive less than 2-3 hours a day). We could save by buying cheaper groceries but at this point in our lives we do like our luxuries (beer, wine, chocolate, meat) so we eat well. We mostly cooked for ourselves. The next biggest budget items were restaurants at $9 a day average (which really meant one meal out every few days or visiting a bakery, our favorite European treat) and hotels at $9 a day - which really means a big city hotel a couple times a month. This line item is also supplemented by using the points from our Chase Sapphire Visa card to book hotels at no cost.

In December 2022 we ferried from Spain to Morocco and began our year in Africa. The main change in our Africa route was due to the war in Sudan. Knowing that we could not travel north through Sudan as planned, we decided to ship from Kenya to Oman. Unfortunately this meant we would not be driving through Ethiopia and Egypt, two countries we had really been looking forward to. But they are also two countries that are extremely difficult to bring your own vehicle into so we saved ourselves significant bureaucratic hassles and expense by avoiding them. It also allowed us to add in the Arabian Peninsula which we were excited to explore.

In Africa the average cost for the two of us was $117 a day. Once again, gas was the biggest line item although the cost was much less than Europe, at $26 per day. The biggest surprise for us was the second largest budget item - an average of $22 a day for travel documents for 30 different countries. This includes visas for the two of us, and vehicle permitting (we don’t use a Carnet de Passage).

We successfully shipped the truck from Kenya to Oman in early January 2024 and set out to explore the Middle East. Surprisingly for us it was the least expensive area we had traveled overland. We never paid for a camping spot with wild camping readily available everywhere. Water was easy to find from free public sources, gas was cheap and so was food. Despite having a third person along with us for a few weeks of our time, we ended up our trip around the Arabian peninsula, averaging $74 a day. As US citizens, most of our visas were free. (More detail on this on our lessons learned in the Arabian Peninsula page).

At the time we were in the Middle East, the war between Israel and Hamas was heating up. We made decisions about our route based on our analysis of how safe it was for us as US citizens in a US plated vehicle to visit certain countries. Because of this, we did not drive through Iraq to Turkey as many of our European fellow overlanders did. We have heard wonderful things about the people and the country, but were getting mixed reports about safety for US citizens and the US state department definitely advised absolutely against us traveling there. After a lot of internal debate, we made the decision to drive from Jordan to Israel, quickly cross Israel, and ship from Israel to Greece.

In Asia, we faced some of our most challenging overlanding experiences to date. First, it was a little unnerving securing a Russian transit visa as American citizens, but we were successful and managed to cross a tiny portion in five days. (We were pulled over for “private interviews” with plain clothes security several times, questioning us on our views with on the war in Ukraine). Next, at our time of travel, China was still requiring overlanders to travel with a guide so twice we teamed up with other overlanders to share the cost of crossing different sections. As we were completing our route, it was opening up and some guides were starting to be able to support overlanders driving on their own, we hear it is getting easier. Our final and most challenging hurdle was that Thailand was cracking down on its law forbidding foreign camper vehicles from entering without an expensive and lengthy permitting process (for our vehicle around $2,000 and six weeks for a Foreign Vehicle Permit or FVP). Without the time or money, we ended up loading our truck on a flatbed and having it transported from Cambodia to Malaysia for us. We investigated shipping out of Cambodia but their shipping agents are not accustomed to dealing with private party vehicles and we had already committed to shipping out of Malaysia, sharing a container with a Dutch couple.

As far as expenses in Asia, if we had not set ourselves such a challenging timeframe and driven less it would have been sigificantly cheaper. Gas came in at $23 a day, but the cost of hiring a guide for China and getting around Thailand added to the budget so that we ended up averaging $104 a day for the two of us.

At the time of writing, it is August 2026 and we made it to South America, slowly making our way north from the southern tip of Argentina. In the end, we successfully shipped the truck from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Santiago, Chile.