A little history

I was born in Tripoli, Libya in 1979 and then smuggled out of the country in a stack of blankets about 2 weeks later because the US embassy which was processing my birth certificate was sacked and burned to the ground.

Although I will admit that the rest of my childhood was slightly less dramatic, nobody I know well would try to wrangle a notion of normality into its definition, certainly none of my 9 siblings who shared the ride.

My parents left the US when they were teenagers and have never really looked back since. They have traveled much of the world in search of a meaningful existence, punctuated by different phases or projects: missionary, educational, humanitarian, development. At this moment they are in Tanzania helping out at an orphanage.

I spent the first 17 years of my life quite literally on the road, my parents would explain that they were moving on to the next project and although that may be true it was also most certainly linked to tourist visas only being valid in most countries for three months. We never had a penny to our name, in my whole life I never saw my parents hold a nine to five job, (or attempt to) we were always below the “poverty line” no matter which country we were in and yet they somehow always put food on the table and although our existence could be harsh at times it was also extremely rich and taught us all some precious core values which keep us on the straight and narrow to this day.

The logistics of moving around as a family were relatively straightforward when I was born, I had only two older brothers at that point so we all fit into a rather cranky Landrover that my parents had at the time, fast-forward a bit, do the math and things start getting complicated. I learned to drive in an old English taxi, just a little before I could actually see over the sill of the windscreen but a couple of cushions did the trick. Rather “well loved” Austin taxis were to become our family car for many years as they were built like tanks and it is truly surprising just how many people you can fit in the back if you pack them in the right order!

Shared fare

Some of my earliest memories were of sleeping on the floor of the taxi with my siblings under a “T” shaped plywood plank about a foot above our heads with our parents sleeping on that. No room for things likes claustrophobia down there… no room for anything actually but we were cozy!

My parents also acquired an old American 1972 Avco motorhome although the exact story of how they came to own it is still a bit of a mystery to me. Many fond memories are linked to that motorhome, it was falling apart at the seams at the end but I had planned to completely rebuild it to its former glory until it was burned to the ground by some burglars to cover their tracks. It was a kick to the gut at the time but probably saved me from putting some serious bucks into a vehicle that had done its time.

We also had a Bristol Lodekka double-decker bus for several years. It had been adapted as a mobile library in Switzerland; the roof had been dropped down a few inches to bring it down to the maximum legal height of 4 meters. The bus was donated to my parents by the Rolex foundation and after some seriously needed mechanical repairs, we restored the exterior. She was a beauty and turned heads everywhere we went. Imagine driving into some secluded mountain village in the south of France in an English taxi, a bright red London bus in tow and ten rowdy kids climb out. Half of the village would come out to stare (I’m pretty sure the other half ran for cover). For all the nostalgia I also clearly remember that it had absolutely no ground clearance and even less insulation which far removed it from being a practical camper vehicle of any kind. I can clearly remember winding, Araldite dipped nylon, kite string around the steel air brake lines to repair them after bottoming out even on the paved roads and the spectacle of 3 farm tractors cabled together in a line trying to tow us out of a soggy field. I’m pretty sure that you can still find the ruts on Google Earth!

Mother and sisters with part of the fleet

As you can imagine our vehicles were often needing repairs just to keep them running enough to get safely from “A” to “B”. We never had a spare penny for repairs so when something broke well, one way or another, we fixed it. My dad had a totally fearless approach to anything mechanical and would not hesitate to take something apart without a clue in the world about how it worked because he would “figure that out later” and he certainly passed this pragmatic approach on to me.

Like father, like son

From as far back as I can remember I was always curious, indeed fascinated with anything mechanical, it seems like any family photo snapped during repairs has a rather grubby yours truly somewhere in the background, I cannot claim to have become the family mechanic at any specific point in time, I simply was.

My parents burned all our bridges in Europe and shipped the family out to Uganda for a project they were putting together there at the time. Sometime in 1998 over the dinner table, I found myself being proposed a position as a manager for the ground fleet for the Ugandan branch of mission of aviation & flying. Clearly my parents had slightly oversold my skillset again!

"I'm pretty sure it's that thing down there"

I think this was a tipping point for me because as conscious as I was that I did not have the credentials, and more importantly, the necessary experience to accept that job I was all the same totally enthralled by the idea and it got some cogs turning in my head double time.

I had grown somewhat weary of taking things apart to try and figure things out to fix them as this approach was already showing its limits. I wanted to “know everything”

Although at the time I was still quite involved in my parent’s project in East Africa I had already set my goal to move on from the “tinkering family mechanic” to something more professional, more concrete.

Bush doctor

About a year later, driver’s license in hand, I was driving my first car, a Yugo Zastava (google it) bought for 15£ “on condition he left the radio”, down from London to Geneva where I had been promised a summer job in a youth center while I tried to work out a way to get into the Geneva mechanics school.

Getting into the school proved to be a huge challenge and is a story on its own which I will save for another time but I eventually did. Although I was homeschooled for several years, fractions and algebra remained a foreign and unkind language to me. After a very rough first year catching up on “one or two things” I got into the swing of things and my head teacher fast-tracked my curriculum arguing to the headmaster that “Mr. Stern should not be wasting his time please allow him to follow the curriculum of 2nd and 3rd year at the same time”.

By this time I was steering away from the various odd jobs that were keeping food on the table and accepting more and more mechanical jobs on cars that people would bring me to fix after school hours. It was absolutely intense but the extra practical experience was helping my grades and although I didn’t see it at the time, I was building the core of what would be my future clientele.

2003 was the last year of training for my federal mechanics certificate and I officialised my business. The Pitstop Garage was born. After a year dedicated to getting the business off the ground, I was back enrolled in advanced mechanics and diagnostics studies to add the prestigious “Brevet fédéral” to my belt 3 years later.

Our little family ready for the big journey

Much more importantly, in 2003 I married Fayrouz, my darling wife, who came from a diametrically opposed background but something clicked, we now have two amazing daughters, Norah and Sofia. We have always loved to travel and at least once a year we would fly off as a family but there is no escaping that the past 20 years have been far more sedentary than the first set. I have long wished that our family could experience first hand some of the craziness that I had long considered a normality but I have found it impossible to replicate in the short periods allowed within the constraints of work & school etc. Fayrouz shares the wanderlust and has added some much needed structure. I think I am quite good at getting us out of trouble, Fay does her best to ensure we don't get there in the first place !

In the early days there was a bit of a rift (think Grand Canyon) between our expectations when it came to comfort when we would travel. Over the years we have found some middle ground and I will not hide behind my wife when I say that our idea of "roughing it" now includes hot water and cold drinks. An overland motorhome seemed a pragmatic package that would allow the various prerequisites to come together and it has been on the drawing board (at one time quite literally) pretty much since we have been married.

That dream was remodeled and refined until we could finally make it become a plan and finally, some 18 years later, we are hugely looking forward to this overland adventure.