About being on the Road

This blog is the English version of www.brauner-benz.de. The original page was published by the end of the nineties, as one can tell just by looking at the poor design. The term "blog" wasn't yet established back then. That came later on. It is mainly a road trip diary that starts in 1996 and consists of chronologically ordered logs, all of them in German.

Though those stories inadvertently inspired many people to travel the world with very little money, the main audience consists of people who dream about travelling the world, but have no serious intention of actually leaving their home country. Most of them have valid reasons, but just 'not being rich' is not a valid one. Most people one meets traveling over land in their own vehicle are mostly financially well situated, or they are pensioners. They travel in fancy cars that clearly go into the six-digits when it comes to the price. It is extremely rare to meet someone out there on the road that has a nine-to-five job, because these people usually don't have the money to afford the vehicle, let alone the time to do a road trip with no set return date.

As Chuck Yeager put it, though: «It's the man, not the machine.»
It is completely possible to travel the world with a car worth less than 500 Dollars, as long as it fulfills certain criteria:

_{1982 Mercedes-Benz 200D, Diesel Engine, 60hp, maximum speed 135 km/h (84 mph) (1995)}

While in most cases it should not be a problem for many people to replicate the trips, unfortunately it is practically impossible to replicate the concept of the original blog on Steemit. In order to publish a concluded roadtrip diary, one would have to start with the first log and write all of them in chronological order until catching up with the current one. Implementing a current trip would only be possible after first publishing all the trips of the past, which would take years. Instead, it will be more a collection of short stories from the road, regardless of chronology or geography.

According to my experience, although Americans are way more familiar with the concept of road trips than Europeans, one doesn't meet many of them on the roads outside North America. In all those years I only met a single American on a road trip - in Pakistan. He was driving alone in his Land Rover from Los Angeles to New York by heading West.

Hopefully this blog in English encourages a few more people to hit the road and explore the globe, for the world is not per se a hostile place. Friendship between nations should not be defined by rich old men and vested interest groups meeting behind closed doors in international panel meetings, waving at cameras and dictating their rules to everybody else through the newspaper corporations they own. The road is a much better place to achieve lasting relationships between people. After all, people who know each other don't tend shoot each other.

Where there is a road there is a way...