The Hugo Diaries - Prologue

20 days before Day 1

7th July 2015

Barnsley

United Kingdom

Two days before Guy and his brother Adam drove to Antwerp, Belgium with Hugo to drop him off at the port, I returned home from doing the ‘big shop’ to a minor blood bath. He’d called my dad over to help him get the drive flanges off the wheel hub so that he could check the brake disks. You know, essential maintenance that we probably ought to have sorted more than just a couple of days before Hugo embarks on his cross-Atlantic voyage.

Hugo is our Land Rover Defender 110. We’d bought him 12 months before from a farm near Wakefield, West Yorkshire as an absolute shell of a thing that before its days on the farm had started life out as an Environment Agency utility van. It smelled of farm quite distinctly in fact and resembled nothing remotely habitable. That is until we spent the year converting him piece by piece into a small but perfectly formed camper.

We scrubbed him spotless and eradicated that smell. We insulated and soundproofed every surface, boarded over that proofing and then carpeted over the boarding. We ran all the electrics and hooked the wires up to various appliances — a fridge, plug sockets, a water pump, a fan, and lighting. We fitted cupboards and drawers, a sink with a tap, a burner, a 36-litre water tank, a diesel heater, a roof light, extra windows in the back seating area and upholstery, curtains, and the pièce-de-resistance: a pop-top roof with tented sides and a fold-out bed. Apart from a toilet (which we couldn’t figure out how or where to fit one), Hugo had it all. Well almost… The only way to get air conditioning was to wind down the windows or open the ventilation flaps at the front.

We’d spent a whole year planning and preparing, doing the upgrades through a bleak English winter with no garage (or even a driveway) to protect us from the elements. We were almost ready.

Then just two days before shipping day, we decided maybe we should take a look at the brake pads. Only when we did so, we discover that the drive flanges were stuck—the good and proper type of stuck. So on the street outside the house, Guy and my dad set about removing the flanges. But it turns out that when a front and a back wheel are disengaged, it effectively renders the handbrake a tad ineffective. Certainly not effective enough for a makeshift street workshop on a gradient slope. It was just one of those things. Neither my dad nor Guy are daft, they’re very mechanically minded and wouldn’t normally have overlooked such a thing, but tight deadlines call for silly mistakes. The result: I returned from the supermarket to hear Guy swearing and cursing profusely with blood coming from his slightly mangled hand. I learned that the car had begun to roll down the street while they were working on it, and as Guy went to try and stop it by sticking a chock under the front wheel, the wheel rolled right over the chock and straight onto his hand. It was only when my dad managed to open the driver’s door and hit his hand against the foot brake that the drama began to subside.

After an afternoon trip to our local A&E which was nicely located a few streets away, the medical professionals determined that nothing was broken, nothing needed stitching and to just take painkillers to ease the pain. Phew! It had, however, set us back a bit and put Guy somewhat out of action and even after all the drama, those flanges were still stuck. We had no choice but to take Hugo to our local Land Rover mechanic the next day. Given that the day after that Hugo needed to be on a ferry to get him to Antwerp, we essentially had to pack the car as much as possible without actually having the car with us for the day.

But at 2 am on 9th July 2015, Hugo was fixed, packed and ready to drive to Belgium for the first leg of his Pan-American adventure.