Bye Bye Landy

By Rich:

Well we're Landyless, yes the old Land Rover that has served us so well this last few years (almost four) has gone on to pastures new, sold within 48hrs of putting my advert up. To a chap who works for a specialist land rover re-manufacturers where it will be done up, possibly with a view to shipping her off to America where the V8 Landies are popular.  Yep, Kat was never too happy about driving the Landy due to the heavy clutch and we really had to reduce our 'car pool' down to just the one practical vehicle (the Ka will have to be sold too in favor of a larger vehicle which Kat is happier to maneuver around Bath) and my Cortina MK3 will stay - you can only afford to have so many toys it seems!!

So what have a I learned from my time with the old girl (not Kat) that I can pass on to anyone who is enthusiastic about these big old trucks. You will love it and hate it in equal measures, you'll love it when it snows and you will find any excuse to drive it (We sold ours the day before the heaviest snow fall we've seen in the four years we'd owned it!!).  

 You will love it when you have something particularly large, heavy and dirty (or all three) to carry.  As a bonus feature mine had a ladder fitted so that you can swing off it like a monkey while unloading which is both fun for onlookers and a good upper-body work-out.

You will however hate it when you have a clean shirt on and something goes wrong meaning inevitably you need to crawl under it to fix it while getting rained on by various fluids, sometimes your own tears as you realize it wont be cheap.  They are not soulless vehicles and have a sense of humor of sorts - so it will always wait until you have the aforementioned clean shirt on before pulling any funny business. 
You will also need to have a set of tools and preferably know how to use them too! As almost everything on a landy is heavy duty and over engineered, they are simple to work on but everything requires a fair amount of swearing, skinned knuckles and reaching, lifting and pulling.

All that said it was one of the best cars we've ever bought, it just did it's job (sometimes reluctantly) but it was a good truck and never really let us down, I never let it down either by doggedly continuing to maintain it even when lack of funds/time or appropriate tools caused jobs to drag on and much knuckle skinning and swearing ensued.

Now my greatest regret about buying such an awesome bit of kit like a landy is never taking it properly off-road.  Yhea, I've seen the signs with "not suitable for road vehicles" before and taking it as an open invitation proceeded up there anyway (albeit carefully and with consideration for both the road and anyone I might meet) but I mean proper off roading! If you decide to buy a landy sign up with a local club who organises 'Green-Laneing' or trips to a 'Pay and Play' site and find out what your vehicle is really capable of, this is something I never had time to do but I think it's something I missed out on...

...What?! I imagine this is exactly what Green-Laneing is like, isn't it?

Anyway bye old friend I really miss you, although it is nice to have my knuckles fully healed up for a change.