tl;dr - drove from North Carolina to Florida to look at a 73-series, bought it, drove it back to NC the next day, sold my house, left my job, threw a few parts into the drivetrain, put my dog in the back and drove 5,000km across the Lower 48 in the middle of winter to a new life in the Pacific Northwest.
Pictured: Totally not kidding about that, by the way.
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...and that pretty much covers the last year of my life, which means that you're all caught up and everyone can officially stop reading. Should anyone choose to continue, be forewarned: the remainder of this so-called "build thread" will probably be comprised of little more than my incessant stumbling along the rather unkempt road of vintage Toyota ownership, a few pictures that aren't really as good as I'd like them to be, and a truly annoying propensity for making questionable life choices and writing about them at nauseating length. I mean, think about it: I daily-drive an HZJ73...and life choices can't get much more questionable than that without involving either democracy, existentialism, the ménage à trois, or - if you're
really good - all three at once.
Speaking of bad life choices, I made a very significant one just now: I completely desynchronized my own thread by teasing a middle-of-a-road trip picture without even fully explaining how I ended up with a Land Cruiser in the first place...and that is what's referred-to as
exceptionally poor form. But wait: there's less: when I sat down to type out that explanation, it reached a length that would give
Anna Karenina a serious case of size envy...which is also
exceptionally poor form. So, I'm going to summarize everything as best possible by saying that after many years of searching, last August I found an HZJ73 for sale in Florida in the condition I was demanding and at a price I was willing to pay, which is not only how the "drove from North Carolina to Florida to look at a 73-series, bought it, drove it
back to NC the next day" thing took place, but also how I drove through an absolute
storm of bugs in a freshly-detailed Land Cruiser on the way out of Florida and then managed to stop in rural Georgia in the middle of the night for a dinner break and
not realize that I could have been at the Waffle House when I took the first picture of a newly-purchased truck that I'd coveted for nearly thirty years.
Pictured: And if that isn't existentialism and/or exceptionally poor form, then I don't know what is.
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Okay, so
now you're all caught up, and I spared you the details of a corporate land grab, contract negotiations, family strife, seriously-heavy life choices, the exodus from a brutally-toxic workplace, the sale of two beloved Jeep projects, a spontaneously-collapsing bathroom floor, 30 cubic yards of things that my partner and I just didn't need to keep, an entire tax bracket's worth of stuff that we didn't even realize we'd accumulated in the first place, a nice little Airbnb in the bad part of town, storage units, favors-called-in, shifting deadlines, a first-class airline ticket for a twelve-pound bunny, tearful farewells, an unplanned nap on the western coast of Iceland, an entire town of puppy-haters and a bunch of other stuff that would make for some good
Days of our Lives fodder; thus, we can just get right back to the part where I pack the dog into the rig...
Pictured: Say hello, Leia.
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...and start out on a cross-country journey that will eventually cover the aforementioned 5,000km, from North Carolina all the way to Olympia, Washington. By the way: I don't mean "approximately 5,000-ish, give or take a few dozen, because honestly, who's counting?" when I say that; rather, I mean
exactly 5,000km.
Pictured: January 28th, 2023. Also, pay attention; this number becomes important later on.
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Yeah, yeah, I know: the dash isn't clean...but it's
usually clean, so I'm giving myself a permission slip on this one. Also, if you're wondering about why it doesn't look like winter in any of those photos (aside from the first one): winter didn't really hit until we were three days into the trip and pushing through western Kansas. Until that time, nothing really happened except some late-night pizza at surprisingly-affordable hotels, and a strange dearth of traffic through some of the flattest parts of the country. I'm not kidding about that, by the way: you've already seen the rear view...but here's what it looked like from the cockpit.
Pictured: Kansas is downright riveting. Also, nobody told me that the Rapture happened.
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Yeah, yeah, I know: the wiper arms need refinishing and the hood needs paint where the clearcoat is blistering. I'll challenge you, however, to show me an early 90's Toyota where the paint on the hood and wiper arms
isn't doing that...and when I say this, I mean exactly the opposite: please don't actually show me intact surfaces until I get these repainted, lest I feel absolutely awful about myself. I've wanted a 70-series since I first saw one in a magazine centerfold spread back in the mid-90's - also true of Victoria Silvstedt, come to think of it
- so the fact that portions of it desperately need my attention sometimes keeps me up at night. On other nights, thoughts of secondary fuel tanks and a better spare tire carrier keep me up, and on still
other nights it's the twelve-pound rabbit playing with the nine-stone Central Asian that are at fault. Thankfully I didn't have
both of those with me on the trip, or I would have completely missed out on the riotous, sensory-overloading explosion of hue and chroma that was Colorado.
Pictured: ...
...
...
Hang on a sec: I haven't really said much about actually
building the rig, have I? I mean, this is supposed to be a
build thread, but here I am - somewhat as promised - rambling on about a road trip and rabbits and a massive relocation, but not really doing a lot of
building. Five entire pictures and not a single thing has been
built: it's downright shameful. To be honest, however, I'm not exactly sure how much
building I'm going to do, or even where the
build is going to go. Hell, I haven't even given the rig a name, yet...and that's not just because I'm terrible at naming things; it's because I'm still unaware of what direction
I'm heading in life...so how on earth am I supposed to know what to do with a JDM Land Cruiser before I actually get there with it?
Then again...perhaps that's what owning a Land Cruiser is all about: heeding that call to find new horizons, and taking the road unknown to find whatever lies in wait at the end. Perhaps the build isn't so much about the rig, but about the person that's in the driver's seat; perhaps it's about building a different life on a distant shore, over the hills and far away, and finding a bit of solace in stepping ever-closer to
terra incognita. In one fashion or another, we will inevitably find out...so: I'll try and keep things interesting along the way.
Stay tuned, Dear Reader...and even if we should never cross paths out there in the Wasteland: thank you for whatever part in this journey you eventually play.
To be continued...
