-Our plan was, for this trip, to do one year
because we had no idea what we were doing.
We didn't know what that would look like or what that meant,
so that plan changed very quickly,
and instead, we spent two and a half years
just driving to Panama and then back again.
An overlander is essentially
someone who travels long-term by vehicle,
self-sufficiently, across borders.
-You're not really tied to anything.
You have limited possessions,
and you just go where you want to go.
-Karin and I were so ridiculous
in the things that we packed initially.
We brought a juicer, at least six water-purification devices.
We never used one of them.
-Right. -And the full-head mosquito net.
So those things didn't make the cut.
-You find out what you really need, what's actually important.
My biggest thing with traveling long-term versus short-term
is the tools that you would need for your vehicle.
And so we took a spare of everything that we could.
-And parts were hard to come by in those countries,
but here you can get parts.
I mean, it may take you a couple hours to find a mechanic,
but you can find a mechanic.
For a long-term trip,
you kind of have to plan for all situations.
But on a week-long trip, you can really plan to your location,
and that's probably gonna make
your packing easier than anything else.
But there are some things that are the same.
The main thing to me about road-tripping is to make it
as easy as possible so you can enjoy the trip,
rather than the day-to-day stuff.
There's a lot of essentials
that we are strong believers in on the road.
We are huge coffee drinkers.
Great coffee is very regional, and it's different
everywhere you go, and it starts your day off.
So for us, it was really important
that we found the right coffee press,
and that comes with us everywhere we go.
-Ziploc bags.
It is amazing how much you use Ziploc bags.
-For storage, for wet things, to organize things,
to pack it out when you go to the bathroom on the side
of the road or places that aren't that convenient.
-Cable ties.
These things saved us all the time on the road.
You can use them for everything, like --
-You can repair clothing with cable ties.
-Right. -You can repair shoes with them.
But mainly, those cable ties
will bail you out of most vehicle situations.
-Another thing that saved us are bungees.
-And there were bumpy roads that we didn't expect,
and things were flying all over the car.
-Right. -And you can just really
secure things with bungees.
-Also lighting.
These are just some little LEDs, and they plug in via USB,
and we had a battery pack that we just plugged these into.
And we could use them to light up our entire campsite.
-No matter where we were,
whether we had power or not, we had light.
-Right, pretty awesome -And that's so important.
Again, road-side fixes of the vehicle -- you need light.
-And we also used these battery packs a lot.
We have bigger ones.
They're all shapes and sizes.
But you essentially just plug a little USB
in here, like, with the lights.
This is an external hard drive.
We used these all over the place.
We have multiple hard drives.
-Laptops break, and they get mojitos spilled on them.
-These are spectacular moments in your life
that you don't want to lose.
-By far the most important piece of gear --
short-term trip, long-term trip, camping, hotels,
doesn't matter -- is this, the oh-glorious packing cube.
-They're so necessary. -Everything -- everything
and a bag of biscuits -- the packing cube.
This made our lives 100 times easier.
-Yeah.
-We don't go anywhere without our packing cube.
-It's the only way to stay organized.
-Frequency of use, I think, is the most important factor
in figuring out how you pack for these trips.
So we had a bin just for backstock,
for things that we don't use very often or things
that we just carried extra of but we wouldn't need
but once every few months,
which is another reason those packing cubes are so great,
because you can just switch the order of the packing cubes
without having to reorganize and take out everything.
-Yeah. -We drive now if we can drive.
-Remember, don't push it up till we get the other side.
Oh, I guess we can. -It's who we are now.
The car is home. -Mm-hmm.
-There are times we sit out in the driveway in the car
just chit-chatting for two hours.
-We have popped the tent in the driveway.
-Yeah, we've camped in our own driveway.
It's therapy. -Yeah.
-The road trip is when I feel the most at home.