Jen Usinger and Jared Simpson watched as their Jeep was loaded into a shipping container, ready to begin its journey across the ocean without them. For Jen and Jared, this was the beginning of a new lifestyle that not only required selling their house and quitting their jobs, but building a machine capable of traversing a foreign land while still feeling like home.
Both Jen and Jared began their outdoor pursuits at a young age. Jen called it car camping. It was how she and her family explored the less-traveled parts of Idaho, California, Nevada, and eastern Oregon when she was a child. “I didn’t even see a campground with a toilet until I was 12 or 13,” she recalled. Jared’s introduction to driving 4x4s was on his family’s eastern Oregon ranch, before he even learned to drive on the road. His time in the Boy Scouts contributed to his wilderness skills with lessons in backpacking, navigation, and cooking. After a honeymoon in South Africa and multiple trips across the American West in a home-built teardrop trailer, the couple craved a type of travel much more substantial than a vacation.
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2022 Summer Safari
NEK Overland led the way into parts of Vermont and a bit of New Hampshire most will never see
This fourdoor Ford foreshadowed late-model Broncos
Ddecades ahead of the '20 four-door Bronco, and even preceding the Ford Explorer and Excursion, came an SUV that could have passed for OEM and was built to answer the call for a three-row people-haulin' off-roader.
JEEP OR BLAZER BUILDING
I was hoping to pick your brain as to a couple of different builds. I have a '19 Jeep Wrangler JL and a '74 Chevy Blazer. I'm a little baffled as to what to focus on. The '74 full convertible Blazer is my dream vehicle. She's been a long build and now I am thinking of focusing my energy on my wife's '19 Jeep JL. I recently joined a Jeep club and have been going off-road with a few guys. I'm shopping around for lift kits. Would you suggest that my time be spent and focused on the Blazer or enjoy the Jeep? I really can't do both.
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10 days, 25,000-plus Jeeps, 225,000-plus spectators
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A new alternative to the old off-road jack
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DECKED OUT SILVERADO
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SANDTASTIC!
Dangle the opportunity to put the hammer down on more than a dozen square miles of the largest coastal dune complex in the world, add in partying with family and friends at sand camps, spice it up a bit with a variety of motorsport competition and nightly concerts, and it's easy to see why the five-day