Right before we set off from the UK, I phoned our local Toyota dealership, Toyota Jemca in Bracknell to get our soon to become home, booked in for a service and check off.
I can’t say anything bad about this experience, everything was more than positive. I spoke to Vince, he went away and checked that they were able to get hold of all the parts to service the truck (the 70 series wasn’t sold in the UK Market, and our 76 has a factor engine swap, so it makes it even more difficult as the expected parts for the service may actually be different, such as one of our belts that had a squeak) and he got me all booked in. Getting to Jemca, I spoke to the team and explained a bit about our trip. Vince re-assured me, that they’d park our truck inside their garage overnight when it wasn’t being worked on and nobody was there. I can’t thank the team enough.
After the service had been carried out and was complete, I got an email and SMS message with a link to a page where I could see the state of everything that had been checked out and a little video explaining what had been done and showing the vehicle. I’ve never had something like this before from a vehicle service and it is really a nice touch!
When we went down to pick up our “home” from Jemca, we had a walk through and took some pictures with the team. Everything felt right with the service and the truck and I was more than comfortable to drive off, knowing our truck had been well looked after.
Next was to take the truck down to the port in Southampton where we would leave it to be shipped over to New York.
Picking the truck up in New York, we were ready to set off and explore what we can in the 3 months we had on our ESTA (visa waiver) in the USA. Our starting mileage was 102,753.
Over the next 3 months we explored the US from East to West (with a little bit of up and down, but not as much as we could have done if we were earlier in the year with more time). You can read all about that in our other blog posts.
Our truck didn’t cause us any problems during the 8,764 miles that we drove, which is to be expected from a Toyota LandCruiser. Near the start of our trip, we heard a knocking after a few days which I couldn’t figure out or find. After emptying the truck into a motel room and driving to a garage, I couldn’t hear it. So we must have left something, somewhere in the truck where it was rolling around and causing a knock as we went around corners. Since then, the only issue we’ve had is a small chip/crack appearing in our windscreen around Los Angeles. A visit to a Windscreen repair place has fixed that for us.
Finally, we got to San Diego, our last town before crossing the boarder from the USA into Mexico (ok, so the title is a little lie, it wasn’t from Bracknell to Baja California, Mexico on a single service, not quiet anyway) where we got another service on the truck before heading down into Mexico. This was a little bit more challenging as the LandCruiser (and the 70 series as well) is even rarer here in the US than it is in the UK, and diesel engines are even more uncommon. This service was carried out with 111,517 miles on the clock.
Onto Mexico!