I seen you have All Terrain tires on your FJ, are you happy with that? Would you have rather had Mud Terrain tires on? Would you want a different vehicle if you did it again? Like a 4 door Wrangler or an Toyota 4Runner?

What would you change about the vehicle you took l, if anything is mostly what I’m curious about

I love my FJ. But it might be nice to have a little bit longer vehicle with a bed in back. That's the only downside.

Yeah I've been buying Goodrich All Terrain T/A since the first crappy set of street tires wore out. I'm very happy with them. I'm not sure I'd want mudders in most normal situations. I'm guessing they're pretty loud on the highway. These A/Ts are a good balance for me. Although it's about time for a new set at $800 a pop.

I was curious if it would be a little small for such a long trip, even mostly being solo.

I have thought about finding an older 4Runner and traveling around the Rockies for a couple months. Following your trip and watching YouTube has given me lots of ideas.

I think I would go with a MT on mine though, love AT but if I didn’t have a winch I would want a more aggressive tire while out traveling

A winch would be Must for me

A wench could be useful, too, if she can drive a stick shift.

There is no mud tire gonna get you out of a wet ditch bank. He was sitting high centered on top that ditch bank. That guy dragged him 15 feet on his frame before he could get a bite to climb out. Winch would be a necessity on a trip like that and hope you have something to hook to.

ROFL

Heh! Heh! My Prelude I had in Boston was a stick shift. I could handle that.

If you notice what really got me out was when he yanked left instead of pulling me forward. I think he was waiting for the other car to pass.

I agree I probably wasn't getting out of there. But I was able to back up from the front of the ditch to the back - so the car was moving and I wasn't completely stuck on the frame. Then I clanged against the drain pipe in the back and at that point the car dug in and wouldn't go back forward.

I really wish I'd tried a couple things just out of curiosity:

1) I forgot to turn on rear differential lock until the end when we had the tow strap on. Maybe that would have made a difference as the high-side left tire might have grabbed more.

2) If that got me moving forward with a little speed, I'm really curious if I could have rocked it to the right to climb up the side a little bit, then pulled hard to the left and used gravity/momentum to get up and out to the left.

Probably not but I'll always wonder if it might have worked. There was a small part of me that wanted to get back into the ditch and try it after the guy pulled me out - lol.

And yes that's the problem with a winch. Unless you're traveling in pairs, you never know for sure you're gonna get stuck somewhere with a nice tree or big rock to tie off to. I guess you can bring stakes though. I go out in the CA deserts a lot where it's mostly sand. That could get really difficult. And if you are traveling with a buddy - a strap is usually as good as a winch.

On the FJ the only way to do a real winch is with a custom bumper. So you're talking about $3500 for a good bumper and winch, not including labor, and a bunch of extra weight.

My last two Panama posts are up. These have the longer stories of checking out the edge of the Darien Gap, and crossing the Panama Canal in a small sailboat - really cool experience.

http://ushuaiaorbust.com/2018/07/09/panama-end-road/

http://ushuaiaorbust.com/2018/07/28/...boquete-canal/

I'm currently back in LA looking for a job. I plan to do one more post with a summary and Best Of the Trip kind of thing when I get some time.

https://i.imgur.com/tfeCGYT.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/c2n1ADS.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Ju1RErB.jpg

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SkxSFLdEqW0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The final blog post might not come until after I find a job, as I'm pretty busy interviewing and trying to brush up my skills.

I did however make a hopefully humorous blog post about some of my job search fails so far, and some thoughts on the modern tech interview: https://medium.com/@suzzer99/how-not...h-1e99d96358c6

I thought we used to have an IT professionals thread, but I can't find it. So I figured I'd just post here.

I sort of followed this at the time, but didn't really have time to dig into the blog.

Read a random FB post earlier about the entire Pan-Am trip, which led me down a rabbit hole of the road trip and Darien Gap, etc... and remembered this trip.

Didn't really have anything unique to add, but loved the detail and can appreciate all of the research that went into a trip like that.

I saw a mention of being a digital nomad at some point... I've researched a bit on that lately, and especially as more countries get on board, it's more and more enticing. It would completely change your world, where your day-to-day is the vacation and you take a little PTO to head back to the US or off to another country.

I've worked with a lot of people who do this and I have done so on a few occasions. Had one guy on one of my teams where we didn't know where the hell he was going to be calling in from. Who cares where you are, just do the job. Shoot, sometimes you are legit on vacation and still dialed in so what's the diff? I'd rather hear the ocean in the back ground over a barking dog or crying kid.

Agreed, this thread was a serious piece of work by suzzer

He documented it like a genuine blogger with tons of well written reports from locale's large and small, tons of great pics illustrating it all

Yep, all you need is reliable internet and a VPN. I've seen several programs where it looks like they go all out in trying to set you up with living arrangements and what not, but I don't mind just doing the research, either.... granted, with travel visas, I think it would be a different move every ~3-6 months, but that should be made up pretty easily with the differences in cost of living.