The time had come to finish breaking in my new to me 2003 Discovery SE and what better way than a nice week long camping & overlanding trip. It was just 2 weeks ago that I brought her home as a replacement for my tired old 1992 Jeep Cherokee Limited and as much as I love that truck, it was time to move on. While my big Jeep, a locked, sprung over 1995 YJ on 35"s can take me just about anywhere I want, longer trips require some especially creative packing. Though the Discovery has substantially more space, between me, my wife and our dog, we still had to pack a bit tight, it would have been really nice to have had some sort of outside rack to put some things on. I really did not like the idea of heading out without a gas can.

At any rate, all loaded up and ready to go we drove down our block to the main route when I noticed the SLS "Service Engine Soon" light had come on. Since it was a solid light I knew that didn't mean too much, though I really didn't like the notion of heading for the desert with a car in less than 100% operational capacity. I guess I'm just lucky, because after a few hundred feet it started blinking at me. Now being a glass is half full kind of guy, I looked at it as a good thing. I mean, better to have it fail a block from home than in the middle of Death Valley. The engine did feel like it was stumbling a bit so I got out and put my hand over the exhaust, which most definitely was telling me it had a miss.

We headed back home, unloaded the wife and dog and out came the OBD-II scanner which threw a lovely misfire on Cyl 6 message, no surprise there. No problem I thought, I'll just swap the plugs and wires, so I headed down to the local parts shop, picked up my gear, went back home and popped the hood, only to realize to my horror that there was no distributor cap. "Ahh..." I said to myself, "must be a coil pack somewhere, now where in the world did they put it?" Looking all around I saw nothing, so I follwed the wires which lead back behind the engine block to the firewall. "No way", I thought to myself, "that can't be right, what kind of ******* engineer would put a consumable part in a location like that?" Well, as it turns out the ones at Land Rover did.

After a little online reading and a lot of knuckle busting, the SAI "Secondary Air Intake" lines were out of the way and I was able to swap the plugs and wires for cylinders 6 and 8. How anyone is able to do more than that without removing the air intake plenum I don't know, but they must have hands the size of small gnomes. At any rate, I buttoned her back up, fired up the truck and felt for the miss which was gone and all was well. So with the Rover in good mechanical shape, we were ready to head out the next morning for our week of exploration which in spite of a rough start, was completely trouble free afterwards.

Unfortunately I only brought along a little point and shoot and left the SLR at home, but I grabbed a couple of decent shots anyway I thought. Here's a few. (edit) to adhere to Flickr's rules, all these photos are hosted at Flickr

GPS hooked up to my laptop with both Streets and Trips and TOPO software, ready to hit the road.




Flora looks back and me with "how long do I have to be back here?" written all over her face.





An ample amount of space for all of our gear, something I have fought with in the big Jeep for years.





Before adventuring off road, we first had a good stretch of superslab. And though Flora is a great travel dog as she pretty much just lays down and plays with her toy, a few stops along the way to stretch her legs and take in some new smells were in order.





But this is a Land Rover forum, so enough with the dog and wife. Here we are arriving at Death Valley.





There were pretty cool mines in many places, I especially liked this one.





This mine had a great little campsite as well.





But the goal of the trip was also to explore and find places like this as well.





We stumbled across this remote weather station out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.





I nabbed this during magic hour.





My wife taking some pictures of the naturally colored rocks on "Artist's Drive"





There really were some amazing views out there.





It was nice to be able to ride in comfort out there, even though it is winter, it did get pretty warm during the day.





Flora says "what's for lunch?"





Heading into Echo Canyon.





A view of the Canyon from the inside.





Not all who wander are lost.

 

Awesome pictures. I enjoyed them! Thanks

 

Looked like a good trip.

 

Heh, you've got a different idea of 'tightly packed' than me Though hopefully by spring with a drawer system in place and some sliders etc I'll post some pics but hey, the goal is to get out there and you got to do that! I'm trying to get a 10,000km expedition to central Mexico organized right now myself, and with 3 people per car with camping, climbing, and mountaineering gear it's going to be interesting.

You might want to consider a roof soft-pack if you're just using it from time to time as they're the most affordable option though you'll probably want to mount it to cross members due to the sunroof. (so tempting to weld those up, the British shouldn't be allowed to do anything involving eletricals or critical components for keeping out weather. ) Yeah, I feel your pain on the coils, a side project next year is going to be to put in hot coils and mount them somewhere else.

 

GREAT PICTURES! Dang that looks like so much fun. I will def. look into taking a trip there! THANKS FOR POSTING!

 

Thanks guys, it was definitely a fun trip and I got to get a good feel for her out there. We ended up doing just shy of 1400 miles over 1 week and aside from burning a lot of gas, the Rover did extremely well and I'm already trying to put together another trip now (a much shorter one however).

Also I had originally started making plans for going a bit bigger than I think I want to now that I've got a feel for what kind of clearance issues I'll need to deal with on the trails I want to run with the Disco. I suspect I'll likely just do OME medium springs all around, maybe heavy in the rear to level out the heavy gear and some 31"s on the stock 18" wheels. I know smaller rims would give me more sidewall, but I'm really mostly on the street with her and I'm doing light duty stuff anyways.

ajh: I thought about making some sort of drawer system also so I could move some of the gear more upwards while still giving the dog room to be back there. The Mexico trip sounds pretty awesome, I'll definitely like to read about that when you go. Also the drawers, if you do make some post up pictures so I have some ideas to steal from for mine. I've been thinking about one design that would have drawers that are say 8-10" shorter than the depth they could go which would leave room for a "secret" compartment, accessable only by lowering the rear seats.

 

Are you in Memphis? I just noticed your spare tire cover...

 

looks like a blast keep up the good work

 

seems fun, nice photos

 

Wow awesome pics. Thanks for sharing!

Dave