Coming Home at Abenteuer & Allrad

There's a dirt track in the far north of Finland that runs until it simply stops. At the very end, there's a loop, built so the logging trucks have somewhere to turn around. You park there. You look out the window. Across a hundred meters of wild, open nothing, a lone hiker is walking. There's something in his hand. A stick? A rifle?

You don't tense up. Because you know he's already looked at you, at the red, the bold, the playful camouflage, and understood in an instant that you're not trouble. You're not the Russians. You're just some fancy, funny-looking expedition truck parked at the end of the world.

That image is the whole reason our truck looks the way it does. And this past weekend at Abenteuer & Allrad in Bad Kissingen, it was the thing that kept bringing strangers to our door.

Four years of walking into other people's trucks

We've gone to Abenteuer & Allrad every year for the past 6 years. Long before we had anything of our own to show, we went as students of the thing, walking into every truck we were allowed to step inside, taking notes, taking photos, stealing ideas shamelessly and gratefully.

I'll be honest: it wasn't easy everywhere on previous fairs. Some vendors made you feel like you had to disclose your bank statement before you'd be allowed to climb the steps and ask a question. There's a certain elite tier you learn to recognize, they literally circle the wagons. Virtually and physically. You'd catch their eye rolls. You'd feel the temperature drop the moment they decided you weren't a serious buyer.

The smaller companies were almost always the opposite. They'd wave you in, let you sit inside, let you open the cabinets and imagine your life in there. Take the idea with you, they'd say. And we did.

We stole the layout idea from a truck at Orange Works. We stole the "We are travelers" note from a company called Burow. And then we made it ours, the bold red, the colorful camouflage that makes people smile instead of bracing for a military vehicle to roll out of the forest. Every dream is assembled this way, from borrowed pieces and from ideas that are stubbornly, entirely your own.

This year we were the ones being walked into

This was the strange and lovely inversion this year. After four years of climbing into other people's homes-on-wheels, we spent this Abenteuer & Allrad again inviting people into ours.

The truck did the recruiting for us. That friendly camouflage works exactly as intended, overlanders spotted it across the field and came over grinning. Our rule became almost a sport: anyone who looked at the truck for longer than fifteen seconds got approached. If there was a smile on their face, we approached even faster.

And we didn't just give the tour. We sat people down and asked them the questions that actually matter, the ones nobody asks when they're trying to sell you a finished product:

How long do you want to stay off-grid, fully autonomous, before you need to plug back into the world? How many of you are traveling? Dogs? Cats? Are you chasing warm regions only, or do you want to head north into the cold too? Do you need a quad along, or is a motorbike enough? Bikes only? Nothing at all?

None of these are small questions. Each answer narrows the dream into something real. Because here's the thing we learned the hard way and now can't stop preaching: knowing your dream in this kind of detail is what lets you find the right builder.

The difference between your dream and his product

There's an enormous gap between a builder who wants to bring your dream to life and one who wants to sell you his product. They can look identical at a trade fair. They are not the same.

We know, because we eventually found a builder who was willing to take a guy who showed up with twelve full A4 pages of requirements and loose ideas, and actually work through them. Not all of those ideas survived. On some, I got strong headwinds, and I'll admit they were right; those ideas deserved to die. On others, we sat together and made the truck genuinely better than what either of us had drawn alone. That collaboration, the willingness to push back, to improve, to serve the dream rather than the catalog, that's the whole game. If a builder never disagrees with you, they're not listening. If they mostly disagree with you, they're selling. The right one does both, at the right moments.

That's the practical heart of what we tried to give people this weekend: not a sales pitch, but a way of thinking about their own requirements before they ever talk money.

Old friends from the road

If the tech and the requirements were the daylight of the weekend, the people were the warmth underneath it.

So many overlanders recognized the truck from former trips and came over just to say hello. One of them turned out to have boarded the same ferry back from Iceland as us. There was the young couple in their Jeep we'd met in Århus, where we were all just guessing we'd be on the same crossing toward Iceland, suddenly standing in our booth in Bad Kissingen like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And then the one that still makes me laugh: a total stranger climbs into the truck, we get to talking, and within minutes we realize we already know each other. From university. Years ago. Two people who'd lost track of each other entirely, reunited because of a funny-looking expedition vehicle at an off-road fair. The world is so absurdly, wonderfully small.

The couple we met at the camp site in Reykjavik, the yellow camper build by a couple who were in our truck last year. The two couples we met in Marokko on our tour. I could go on-and-on.

But the strangest one stretches back further than the road itself. Last year at Abenteuer&Allrad, we stopped at a booth for a company offering services to long-term travelers. We talked to the staff there for a while, then decided their service wasn't for us, and that was that. The story could have ended here, but it picks up again somewhere completely unrelated.

My dad was this spring at the funeral of a distant relative. Proudly, he showed off the truck his son drives. One of the funeral companions mentioned he drives something similar, and my dad connected us. We got in touch, and slowly the pieces fell into place: his company was the very booth I'd stood at the year before. This year, we agreed to meet at our truck.

This is the part the brochures can't capture. You build a home on wheels to go far away, to the end of that Finnish logging track, to the edge of the map, and what you find out there, and at the fairs in between, is that the road is full of people you're going to keep running into. The community is the destination as much as any view is.

Why we keep coming back

So here's where it all weaves together. Abenteuer & Allrad is a trade fair, yes, a place to inspect axles and compare water systems and decide whether you really need that quad. But that's the surface. Underneath, it's four days of conversations: with dreamers who haven't started, with starters who are mid-build, with builders who've been on the road for years already.

We came as note-takers and idea-thieves in recent years. This year we came back as people with a truck others were allowed to step into. And the whole arc of that, from peering into Orange Works and Burow and dozens of others, to handing twelve pages of dreams, to a stranger from university grinning at us in the doorway, only happens because somebody, in recent years, was generous enough to wave us in his home-on-wheels.

So if you go to Abenteuer & Allrad, or any fair like it: walk into the open trucks. Reward the people who let you in. Ask yourself the off-grid questions before anyone asks you for your budget. Find the builder who argues with you for the right reasons. And paint your truck something that makes a lonely hiker in Finland smile instead of reach for cover.

What a fantastic weekend. So many new travelers met, so many old friends from the road found again. It really felt like coming home.

Explore. Dream. Discover.