About Our Jeep

*For more details about the technical specifications of the Jeep and the modifications we’ve made, check out the Bumblebeast page!

Nick and I never really meant to buy a Jeep, or any 4wd vehicle really. We wanted a convertible. Nick’s Nan had a convertible Mustang when he was a kid, and when it came time for us to buy our own car when moving to the Bay Area in 2012, he wanted to buy a Mustang convertible. I said sure, as long as it was bright red. (Stick with me, I promise this post will get to the present day)

We loved that car.

We had to sell the Mustang not even 2 years later as the amazing opportunity to move to Australia came up. We looked into bringing it with us, but Australia has pretty strict car import laws and to convert the Mustang to right hand drive would have cost a stupid amount of money. We figured we’d just buy another one once we landed in Sydney.

Horror: They weren’t for sale in Australia yet. (this being the first of many experiences of North American brands not being available – or even welcome – in Australia. We only just got Amazon a few months ago!) Or, they were for sale, but only the top end pimped out version for something like $75,000, which was pretty significantly above budget.

We started evaluating other convertibles, but the only ones we could afford (cars in Australia are about 50% to 100% more expensive than in the US) were 10 year old BMW Z3’s and Porsche Boxsters that would be fragile and with ‘niche’ (read: expensive) parts.

Nick had the idea of a Jeep Wrangler – it wasn’t really what came to mind with the word ‘convertible’, but the top does come off – and we figured the parts would be easier to come by and labour cheaper than the Porsches and BMWs. And we could afford a newer one with lower mileage, another bonus. Nick set up a few searches on the auto trading websites and soon enough, we had the choice between a black Jeep and a yellow Jeep that both fit our specs.

Of course the yellow won out.

The day we picked her up – the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

The test drive that the previous owner Dean took us on involved demonstration of several of the 4wd features of the Rubicon (which is the top end model of the Wrangler and the one we bought). We hadn’t been super interested in off-roading, thinking that a yellow Jeep with the top down would mostly just be fun for the beach and toodling around Sydney and surrounds, but when Dean climbed a bunch of boulders with no trouble at all, Nick and I thought maybe there was more to this Jeep life.

Rock crawling

Nick proposed that we sign up for a 4wd training class to learn the ins and outs of 4wd touring, rock-crawling, water crossings, and recovering the vehicle when we got into a bind. In that class, we were the only Wrangler, and the instructor joked that he would use us as the demonstration vehicle, because it was the only time a Wrangler would ever need to be recovered (sidenote: we’ve proven him wrong, but only rarely – Nick thinks perhaps a half dozen times?)

Not a recovery situation 😉

Then in 2016, my long service leave was coming up (for non-Australians, long service leave is an extra 2 months leave awarded after working for the same employer for ten years), and we were trying to decide whether to tour Southeast Asia or Australia. After much discussion, we decided on Australia, researched and purchased our touring gear, and off we went.

It was amazing…below are some of our favourite snaps from our two month 2017 tour:

Mystery Bay – our first stop

After we returned from our 2 month trip, we said to ourselves…we could do this for longer. And we certainly had a lot of outstanding places we hadn’t had time for on our “next time” list…

And, well, here we are. Without the Jeep in our lives, I’m sure we wouldn’t have had so many great Australian adventures.

Desert bush camping has the BEST sunsets and sunrises