Greetings, LC friends.
I’d like to share with you my LC story, which actually started about three years ago, before I ever considered buying a Land Cruiser.
In 2011 I got laid off my design job (hostile investor takeover). It was a startup that I helped founded, and I thought I would be there for a very long time. Suddenly, everything changed. I was left numb from the whole experience, and looking for the next job was the last thing I wanted to do.
I decided to take a little time off. A little turned into a lot (7 months). I needed a breather, time to think and reflect.
A few years before I had visited some friends in Ecuador with my girlfriend, where I experienced hiking, camping and horseback riding for the very first time. For a city kid, being in the Andeas mountains was forever a life-changing experience. I needed that feeling again, so I started to venture out to nature, to the trails, for longer and longer hikes, exploring on my own.
First time camping ever, and it was in Ecuador. Incredible.
I started taking my girlfriend on the hikes with me. She loved it. She’s from New York so it’s 180 from much of life there too. From there we grew to bigger, longer hikes, outside the city, up to the Delaware River Gap and beyond. When my money ran out I sold my IS250 and kept hiking. We’d catch the MetroNorth from Grand Central up to the Appalachian Trail stop. We’d catch a bus to a small town, then call a car service to take us to a campground.
View from Cat's Rock, Appalachian Trail Section #3, NY:
Being city kids, we fell in love with the silence, the darkness, the stars. We were tired of feeling like sardines on the train, the two hours to get through Midtown traffic, the aggressive nature of dense populations.
No more of this, please:
After really running low on money, I decided I needed to make a major life change (and generate some income while doing it). I decided to move to Cali!
So here I am, almost two years in Cali. During this time I’ve gotten to see incredible places in Shasta-Trinity, Yosemite, Big Sur and Joshua Tree. The more I see, the more I NEED to see. It’s an ADDICTION. It’s a high that won’t stop, ever. This world is so amazing, right?? I don’t need HDTV when the world around me is a hundred-million times higher resolution.
First time in Yosemite, Merced River:
First time in Big Sur:
First time seeing ancient, massive Redwoods:
My original plan was to move to Cali, and use my leftover savings to buy a Ford F-350 Super Duty Cargo. My buddy in the Coast Guard had opened my eyes to van campers, so I had seen a lot of what people had done, like SportsMobile and others. However, during my research my world was flipped upside down again when I discovered Sprinter campers. Whoooaaa, it was much bigger and I could actually stand up straight.
I was hooked on the idea of a Sprinter camper, but I had bigger problems. I had spent almost all my savings for the vehicle on camping and traveling before I came.. so I had money for nothing.
After living a month on a sailboat in the San Fran marina, I finally managed to get my own place using my first check from my new job. So in San Jose, I am.
San Fran marina:
My girlfriend and I had decided to keep our initial goals realistic, and get a smaller vehicle that still allowed us to explore more of the wilderness and backcountry, and to camp for extended periods of time. The obvious choice was a Jeep Wrangler because… that’s the most obvious choice, right? So after eyeing Wranglers for so long, about two months ago I tell people I’m going to buy a used Wrangler (everyone keeps bugging me about when I’ll get around to buying a car). Well, everyone who used to own one hated it, and warned me that all they did was keep fixing it, or getting it fixed.
Then after a lot more researching on Jeep reliability I found sites like autooninfo.net and carcomplaints.com which completely changed my mind about the Wrangler. I knew I wanted a Toyota, but which one?
I had recently rented a Tacoma for a trip. It was the first time I’d used a pickup truck, and I was really impressed with how useful the bed was (I never thought it was that useful, but over a week of touring Joshua Tree my experience convinced me otherwise.) So I was pretty hooked on the idea of a Tacoma.
If I was going to get a Tacoma it had to be a double cab, which made it more expensive as a 2nd gen. My budget goal was $5k, with $7k being the upper limit. So I started looking at 4Runners. A lot of them. I went to see one at Downtown Ford in Sacramento - long story short the guys were a bunch of overpriced scammers. Not sure why I thought they might be different. After that I was pretty adamant to myself to buy from a private party.
So after tons and tons of 4Runner research, my eyes were blown wide open again when I came across talk of the Land Cruisers. Wow!! They were so gorgeous, but the talk about maintenance and gas mileage had made me think twice.
Then I read the excellent thread on the 80’s cost of ownership: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/should-i-buy-an-80-costs-of-ownership.124556/.
My girlfriend and I had talked a few months ago about focusing our lifestyle to be more outdoors - what did we enjoy doing? What did we want to explore? How did we want to spend our lives? We made a commitment to spending less money on “stuff” and focus on things that would enable more travel and more experiences.
I need more of this, the awe-inspiring Joshua Tree:
So in reflection of that, and what I gleaned from the thread, I realized the 80 series LC was for us. It would serve as one of the main pieces of gear that would enable our new lives, and as such should be hard core reliable and steadfast to take us out into the backcountry alone, and bring us back home. Therefore, the maintenance and upkeep of such a vehicle would be needed no matter if it was an LC, 4Runner, or any other vehicle, and an accepted part of the life.
The 4Runner had felt small in my test drive, which I thought proved useful to fit through small trails, but at the same time would allow the capacity I thought would be needed for us to venture out far, for a long time. As for gas consumption, I planned on offsetting the additional cost by first, driving slow and steady, and second, slimming down from a three-bedroom in San Jose to a one-bedroom in a cheaper place, like Santa Cruz.
I shopped around quite a bit for the right LC. There’s not many that come up for sale, that’s for sure. A few on Craigslist, a few on eBay locally. Most were beat up bad, or modded out already. I just wanted a clean platform to start my own (didn’t want to inherit someone else’s rock crawling smash, or bad installation skills, wiring, etc.).
I decided that I had some room within my budget, to find a lower priced LC and still afford auto transport. I found a good listing, and emailed the owner a lot of questions. He responded openly and had a lot of details, but he had owned it only for about six months and the previous owner had no maintenance history. However he seemed to have given it a once-over inspection, and said he had replaced the head gasket and some other minor things. When he mentioned that the truck would be picked up from his firehouse, I looked him up online and saw that he was a firefighter. These things made me feel more comfortable in bidding on my first online car ever, sight unseen.
I pulled the trigger and decided I would bid. I anxiously waited two days until the end of the auction to bid. I had a flight to NYC and luckily came off the plane just 30 minutes before it ended, placing my first bid in the car on the way out. After a short 2 minute bidding war, I won a 1994 FZJ80 with all lockers, 200k miles for $5,500! Say hell yeeeaaa….
Up until the bidding I had been agonizing over whether I was making the right decision: was I picking the ultimate platform for enabling our dreams, or was I about to inherit a mechanical nightmare that would eat up all our savings, leave us with no budget to travel, shatter our dreams and forever chain us to the office? But with the trigger pulled and the auction won, I felt happy and excited. The worst part was over! Or so I thought.
After about four days of torture in trying to get payment setup through eBay, the non-helpful customer service said it wasn’t possible, but to just submit payment through Paypal itself and it would be the same thing since they owned Paypal. So the seller sent the money request through Paypal, and I paid. Paypal said it would take up to 24 hours to confirm payment, but it really took about three days before the payment cleared. Finally!
This whole time I had used uShip, as advertised on eBay, to source bids from shippers to transport the truck from Texas to Cali. Another frustrating experience as shippers would send offers then cancel; or say they could transport then call back saying it wouldn’t fit on their trailer. Most bids were higher than I had hoped; ~$1,200 - $1,700.
I settled with a shipper for $1,200 all inclusive. He quickly called me up to charge me a deposit. Days and days later, he was still unresponsive, would never return my calls, and couldn’t ever tell me when the vehicle was getting picked up. After about a week of constantly calling him everyday with no status updates, I angrily canceled my shipment.
I had realized it would be cheaper for me to buy a one-way ticket to Texas and drive it back, then to pay this damn fool, so after work on Friday I headed straight to SFO, landed in Austin right before 11p.
The PO picked me up and we headed straight to the firehouse. He gave me a walkaround, the title, we shook hands, and bam, I was in possession of my LC!
I had been pretty nervous about driving this truck ~1,800 miles back. Maintenance history unknown, I was driving through some remote places alone, and with temps reaching over 100F during the day, I was pretty worried about overheating and the infamous PHH.
I slept in the back of the truck that night at Walmart, and headed to a local shop the next morning for a multi-point inspection and oil change before heading on the road.
Three hours later I was ready to go at 11am. I drove the whole day, leaving San Marcos and heading through San Angelo, up through Roswell to Albuquerque. Spent the second catching shuteye at Walmart as well. Left around 5am for Flagstaff, then through Barstow and Bakersfield on 40, then north up RT 5 back to the Bay Area. I had many more stops than this, at small places for gas. I planned my stops at around ~200 miles, which was about 25% left in the tank.
Going through New Mexico:
So I week later, with over 2,000 miles put on it already, I love it. I love the size, it feels stocky and beefy, not huge and unwieldy. It’s got a much more open feeling and headroom than the 4Runner. This thing feels like a truck because it IS a truck. Solid. I had taken a Honda Pilot on a pretty bumpy trail; it rattled so much from the corrugations that I thought the whole truck was going to fall apart. Not so in this beast.
Here is Big Red:
A long journey of exploration and discovery has culminated in a Land Cruiser sitting in my backyard, opening the door to the next chapter of incredible travel and experiences.
I’d like to share with you my LC story, which actually started about three years ago, before I ever considered buying a Land Cruiser.
In 2011 I got laid off my design job (hostile investor takeover). It was a startup that I helped founded, and I thought I would be there for a very long time. Suddenly, everything changed. I was left numb from the whole experience, and looking for the next job was the last thing I wanted to do.
I decided to take a little time off. A little turned into a lot (7 months). I needed a breather, time to think and reflect.
A few years before I had visited some friends in Ecuador with my girlfriend, where I experienced hiking, camping and horseback riding for the very first time. For a city kid, being in the Andeas mountains was forever a life-changing experience. I needed that feeling again, so I started to venture out to nature, to the trails, for longer and longer hikes, exploring on my own.
First time camping ever, and it was in Ecuador. Incredible.
I started taking my girlfriend on the hikes with me. She loved it. She’s from New York so it’s 180 from much of life there too. From there we grew to bigger, longer hikes, outside the city, up to the Delaware River Gap and beyond. When my money ran out I sold my IS250 and kept hiking. We’d catch the MetroNorth from Grand Central up to the Appalachian Trail stop. We’d catch a bus to a small town, then call a car service to take us to a campground.
View from Cat's Rock, Appalachian Trail Section #3, NY:
Being city kids, we fell in love with the silence, the darkness, the stars. We were tired of feeling like sardines on the train, the two hours to get through Midtown traffic, the aggressive nature of dense populations.
No more of this, please:
After really running low on money, I decided I needed to make a major life change (and generate some income while doing it). I decided to move to Cali!
So here I am, almost two years in Cali. During this time I’ve gotten to see incredible places in Shasta-Trinity, Yosemite, Big Sur and Joshua Tree. The more I see, the more I NEED to see. It’s an ADDICTION. It’s a high that won’t stop, ever. This world is so amazing, right?? I don’t need HDTV when the world around me is a hundred-million times higher resolution.
First time in Yosemite, Merced River:
First time in Big Sur:
First time seeing ancient, massive Redwoods:
My original plan was to move to Cali, and use my leftover savings to buy a Ford F-350 Super Duty Cargo. My buddy in the Coast Guard had opened my eyes to van campers, so I had seen a lot of what people had done, like SportsMobile and others. However, during my research my world was flipped upside down again when I discovered Sprinter campers. Whoooaaa, it was much bigger and I could actually stand up straight.
I was hooked on the idea of a Sprinter camper, but I had bigger problems. I had spent almost all my savings for the vehicle on camping and traveling before I came.. so I had money for nothing.
After living a month on a sailboat in the San Fran marina, I finally managed to get my own place using my first check from my new job. So in San Jose, I am.
San Fran marina:
My girlfriend and I had decided to keep our initial goals realistic, and get a smaller vehicle that still allowed us to explore more of the wilderness and backcountry, and to camp for extended periods of time. The obvious choice was a Jeep Wrangler because… that’s the most obvious choice, right? So after eyeing Wranglers for so long, about two months ago I tell people I’m going to buy a used Wrangler (everyone keeps bugging me about when I’ll get around to buying a car). Well, everyone who used to own one hated it, and warned me that all they did was keep fixing it, or getting it fixed.
Then after a lot more researching on Jeep reliability I found sites like autooninfo.net and carcomplaints.com which completely changed my mind about the Wrangler. I knew I wanted a Toyota, but which one?
I had recently rented a Tacoma for a trip. It was the first time I’d used a pickup truck, and I was really impressed with how useful the bed was (I never thought it was that useful, but over a week of touring Joshua Tree my experience convinced me otherwise.) So I was pretty hooked on the idea of a Tacoma.
If I was going to get a Tacoma it had to be a double cab, which made it more expensive as a 2nd gen. My budget goal was $5k, with $7k being the upper limit. So I started looking at 4Runners. A lot of them. I went to see one at Downtown Ford in Sacramento - long story short the guys were a bunch of overpriced scammers. Not sure why I thought they might be different. After that I was pretty adamant to myself to buy from a private party.
So after tons and tons of 4Runner research, my eyes were blown wide open again when I came across talk of the Land Cruisers. Wow!! They were so gorgeous, but the talk about maintenance and gas mileage had made me think twice.
Then I read the excellent thread on the 80’s cost of ownership: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/should-i-buy-an-80-costs-of-ownership.124556/.
My girlfriend and I had talked a few months ago about focusing our lifestyle to be more outdoors - what did we enjoy doing? What did we want to explore? How did we want to spend our lives? We made a commitment to spending less money on “stuff” and focus on things that would enable more travel and more experiences.
I need more of this, the awe-inspiring Joshua Tree:
So in reflection of that, and what I gleaned from the thread, I realized the 80 series LC was for us. It would serve as one of the main pieces of gear that would enable our new lives, and as such should be hard core reliable and steadfast to take us out into the backcountry alone, and bring us back home. Therefore, the maintenance and upkeep of such a vehicle would be needed no matter if it was an LC, 4Runner, or any other vehicle, and an accepted part of the life.
The 4Runner had felt small in my test drive, which I thought proved useful to fit through small trails, but at the same time would allow the capacity I thought would be needed for us to venture out far, for a long time. As for gas consumption, I planned on offsetting the additional cost by first, driving slow and steady, and second, slimming down from a three-bedroom in San Jose to a one-bedroom in a cheaper place, like Santa Cruz.
I shopped around quite a bit for the right LC. There’s not many that come up for sale, that’s for sure. A few on Craigslist, a few on eBay locally. Most were beat up bad, or modded out already. I just wanted a clean platform to start my own (didn’t want to inherit someone else’s rock crawling smash, or bad installation skills, wiring, etc.).
I decided that I had some room within my budget, to find a lower priced LC and still afford auto transport. I found a good listing, and emailed the owner a lot of questions. He responded openly and had a lot of details, but he had owned it only for about six months and the previous owner had no maintenance history. However he seemed to have given it a once-over inspection, and said he had replaced the head gasket and some other minor things. When he mentioned that the truck would be picked up from his firehouse, I looked him up online and saw that he was a firefighter. These things made me feel more comfortable in bidding on my first online car ever, sight unseen.
I pulled the trigger and decided I would bid. I anxiously waited two days until the end of the auction to bid. I had a flight to NYC and luckily came off the plane just 30 minutes before it ended, placing my first bid in the car on the way out. After a short 2 minute bidding war, I won a 1994 FZJ80 with all lockers, 200k miles for $5,500! Say hell yeeeaaa….
Up until the bidding I had been agonizing over whether I was making the right decision: was I picking the ultimate platform for enabling our dreams, or was I about to inherit a mechanical nightmare that would eat up all our savings, leave us with no budget to travel, shatter our dreams and forever chain us to the office? But with the trigger pulled and the auction won, I felt happy and excited. The worst part was over! Or so I thought.
After about four days of torture in trying to get payment setup through eBay, the non-helpful customer service said it wasn’t possible, but to just submit payment through Paypal itself and it would be the same thing since they owned Paypal. So the seller sent the money request through Paypal, and I paid. Paypal said it would take up to 24 hours to confirm payment, but it really took about three days before the payment cleared. Finally!
This whole time I had used uShip, as advertised on eBay, to source bids from shippers to transport the truck from Texas to Cali. Another frustrating experience as shippers would send offers then cancel; or say they could transport then call back saying it wouldn’t fit on their trailer. Most bids were higher than I had hoped; ~$1,200 - $1,700.
I settled with a shipper for $1,200 all inclusive. He quickly called me up to charge me a deposit. Days and days later, he was still unresponsive, would never return my calls, and couldn’t ever tell me when the vehicle was getting picked up. After about a week of constantly calling him everyday with no status updates, I angrily canceled my shipment.
I had realized it would be cheaper for me to buy a one-way ticket to Texas and drive it back, then to pay this damn fool, so after work on Friday I headed straight to SFO, landed in Austin right before 11p.
The PO picked me up and we headed straight to the firehouse. He gave me a walkaround, the title, we shook hands, and bam, I was in possession of my LC!
I had been pretty nervous about driving this truck ~1,800 miles back. Maintenance history unknown, I was driving through some remote places alone, and with temps reaching over 100F during the day, I was pretty worried about overheating and the infamous PHH.
I slept in the back of the truck that night at Walmart, and headed to a local shop the next morning for a multi-point inspection and oil change before heading on the road.
Three hours later I was ready to go at 11am. I drove the whole day, leaving San Marcos and heading through San Angelo, up through Roswell to Albuquerque. Spent the second catching shuteye at Walmart as well. Left around 5am for Flagstaff, then through Barstow and Bakersfield on 40, then north up RT 5 back to the Bay Area. I had many more stops than this, at small places for gas. I planned my stops at around ~200 miles, which was about 25% left in the tank.
Going through New Mexico:
So I week later, with over 2,000 miles put on it already, I love it. I love the size, it feels stocky and beefy, not huge and unwieldy. It’s got a much more open feeling and headroom than the 4Runner. This thing feels like a truck because it IS a truck. Solid. I had taken a Honda Pilot on a pretty bumpy trail; it rattled so much from the corrugations that I thought the whole truck was going to fall apart. Not so in this beast.
Here is Big Red:
A long journey of exploration and discovery has culminated in a Land Cruiser sitting in my backyard, opening the door to the next chapter of incredible travel and experiences.
