I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened. Somewhere between childhood and now, a boxy, utilitarian truck worked its way into my imagination and refused to leave. A movie, probably — but something about the Defender’s shape just stuck. It wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense. It was square and loud and looked like it meant business. I loved it immediately.
Fast forward to the pandemic. Like a lot of people, being stuck indoors made me desperate for the opposite of indoors. My husband Chris and I started binge-watching Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s Long Way Round, Long Way Down, and Long Way Up — something about watching two people ride motorcycles through places that felt impossibly remote and alive just lit a fire. We wanted that. Not on motorcycles, but that feeling of going where you wanted with everything you needed.
That’s when we started overlanding in earnest. Car camping trips, a few days at a time, that combined road trips with real time outside. And pretty quickly, the old Defender idea came back. Not just as a thing to dream about, but as a real question worth asking.
We wanted to travel like Ewan and Charley. And I knew — somehow I’d always known — that I wanted to do it in a Defender.
In the summer of 2021, we ordered a 2020 Defender — the modern version — and started putting it through its paces. Trips up to Oregon with friends, closer-to-home adventures, and eventually our first really long trip out to the Mojave. We even threw a mattress in the back once just to test it. Perfectly fine for a night, but it wasn’t going to cut it for anything longer. The dream was getting more specific, and the modern truck, as capable as it is, wasn’t quite the answer I’d been imagining since I was a kid. What I really wanted was the classic version. I just hadn’t figured out how to make that dream practical yet.
The Bigger Question
Because this wasn’t just about weekend trips. After watching Ewan’s show, I’d started seriously entertaining the idea of driving the Pan-American Highway one day. Chris and I had long conversations about what kind of vehicle would actually make sense for something like that — something reliable, fixable in countries that don’t have the kind of automotive infrastructure we have here in the US, and practical enough for remote terrain where you genuinely can’t count on finding help around the corner.
That ruled out a lot. A brand new truck loaded with proprietary software? A nightmare if something goes wrong in rural Guatemala. We actually went to a Ford dealer at one point, seriously considering a new truck with a bed camper — before talking ourselves out of it. A big shiny new setup rolling through Central America isn’t just impractical, it’s a target. Too conspicuous. Too hard to maneuver on narrow mountain roads. And from a safety standpoint, if something happened and you needed to just drive away fast, a cab-and-camper makes that a lot harder.
We went back and forth on everything — truck and camper, towing a trailer, buying a van. Every option had a fatal flaw. A van gave us the space but felt risky: if something broke, you might be replacing the whole vehicle. Towing was just impractical for the kind of terrain and distances we were imagining. And bigger rigs — a massive truck with a camper, or a trailer in tow — close off a lot of options. Narrower tracks, tighter switchbacks, roads that are really more of a suggestion. Part of what kept pulling us back was staying small enough to go places a bigger setup simply can’t. Less gear, more access.
Why The Classic Defender Won
Every conversation kept circling back to the same three priorities: safety first, then practicality, then comfort. And when I started researching what was actually possible with a classic Defender — not the new one, but one of the old Series trucks that the world has been repairing for fifty-plus years — everything started clicking.
Video after video, I found a whole community of overlanders who had turned these old workhorses into serious expedition rigs. Mechanically simple. Fixable almost anywhere with basic tools and parts. Small enough to move through tight spaces, but capable of carrying everything you need with the right build. The more I watched, the more I realized this wasn’t just nostalgia. This was actually the right answer.
I could build the thing I’d been dreaming about since I was a kid — and it could genuinely be the best vehicle for what we wanted to do. The dream and the practical solution turned out to be the same truck.
That’s where this build started.
Featured image courtesy of LR Defender SA