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Today would be the last early morning of the trip. We got up a little after 7, prayed the cars would start, and then headed to the finish line which was about 3 hours away.

I spent the first half of the drive thinking about the journey and what I would write to my friends and family on Facebook. I’ll admit that I was fighting back tearing up at the thought of getting there and how much the trip had meant. The guys let me take over for the last leg of the drive so that I could be the one to drive to the finish. Very cool.

For being in the middle of absolutely nowhere Ulan-Ude is a surprisingly big city. It took a while to wind through the city and then all of a sudden we pulled into a big open courtyard and there it was.

We waited our turn to drive up on to the stage and get some incredibly awesome pictures taken. After all we’d been through, after all the car had been through. I’m still a little shocked that the Doblo pulled it off. We had cursed it a million times and we couldn’t be ready to be done with it. To it’s credit though that stupid car made it. We limped to the finish line, but we still made it.

There was a ton of paperwork to fill out, including writing our team info on a big board of everyone else who had made it. 45 days later. Out of around 300 teams we finished #108 I believe. As you can imagine we took a ton of pictures, and got a lot with our convoy mates. We have all been together since Turkmenistan.

After that it was up to us to do with all our stuff. We sorted through everything we had looking for any souvenirs. Anything that was still in good condition we added to the donation pile. Mitch decided to take quite a big souvenir for himself, which he managed to do with an axe.

We all booked a room at a hotel a few miles from the finish line, aaaaaaand then we started drinking and didn’t stop.

For those interested here’s my finish line FB post:

“This is a little surreal. After a year of planning and 7 weeks on the road here we are at the finish line of something I never thought I’d be able to do. The Mongol Rally has probably been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s been mentally exhausting, physically grueling, frustrating, and stressful. There were a lot of points where we could have given up. Our car is a 13 year old Italian car that has no business being where we’ve taken it. Our engine blew up, our fuel pump is patched together with bailing wire and glue, all of the suspension is gone. We’ve been stranded in some of the most desolate places I’ve ever been. But we didn’t give up.

It’s also been an incredible and once in a lifetime experience that’s taken me through places I’d never see otherwise. We’ve met so many wonderful and hilarious people along the way and made some great friends. This picture is 100% worth the trouble it took to get here.

Understandably there was a lot of concern for our safety and well being traveling through 20 countries. One of the things I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else is that the world isn’t as scary as we sometimes think it is. There hasn’t been a moment over the last 7 weeks that I’ve felt threatened in any way.

While there is a small fraction that try to make it seem otherwise, this world of ours is absolutely full of good people. The amount of kindness and hospitality we’ve received from strangers is indescribable and unrepayable. We made it to the end in large part due to help from people who don’t speak our language and will never see again, who didn’t have to but many times went out of their way to help us. There hasn’t been any point where our nationality has been an issue. Whether it was the hundreds of honks and waves we got or sharing vodka with Russian border guards (one of whom may or not be in the mob, gave me his #, an open invitation to stay at his home and said he’d beat up anyone who gave us any trouble in Russia – thanks Stas!) most people don’t give a fuck about geopolitics and are just very appreciative that we came to visit their country. They were great representatives of theirs and we’ve done our best to be good unofficial ambassadors for America.

From the bottom of my heart I want to thank my teammates Ryan Goodman and Mitch Walker for going on this crazy adventure. Thank you Rachel for being supportive of this dream of mine, being ok with me being away for 7 weeks. Thank you Robby and Nate for taking care of the office. Thank you to our friends and family for your generous donations to us and our charity. Thank you to our sponsors for helping make the trip a little easier. To a far lesser degree thanks to the cop in Kazakhstan who let me talk him out of a ticket, we all know not having your headlights on at 11 am is a stupid law. Last not least, thank you Doblo for letting us beat you up.

So be nice to people. Be even nicer to strangers. And always bring a towel.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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    Day 47: Finish line +2

    Ryan and I decided to wander around in the afternoon and find some souvenirs. Somewhere along the way we heard some gibberish coming from a loudspeaker in the town square so we headed that way. Turns out it was A BREAK DANCE BATTLE! The guy on the P.A. just kept yelling “blah blah ALL STYLES.”

    For a town square middle of the afternoon break dance battle it ended up being incredibly lame. I’ve seen a better break dance battle start spontaneously at an LMFAO concert 7 years ago, so color me unimpressed. We walked around for a little longer and decided to find some food. Italian sounded awesome, we hadn’t had a solid pizza since America. We did find an Italian place, but we did not find good pizza. Google translate struggled to translate the all Russian menu but we ordered what was supposed to be a “meatlovers” or so we thought. Sorry for the blurry picture, but the pizza had possibly no sauce on it and was just cheese, ham and pickles? Silly Russia…

    Ryan had a flight out that night, so we said our goodbyes. What a fucking adventure.

     

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    Day 46: Finish line +1

     

    Uuuuughhh very rough start. I think I had a 10am appointment to take our car to the train yard and sign over the title but there was no fucking way that was going to happen. We had a very late night and a ton of beer. Rich and I stayed out until close to 4. I think I peeled myself out of bed around 1 and managed to get the car to the rail yard by 2 or so. Thankfully the appointment slots didn’t really mean much, the people there would take about 20 cars per day and it didn’t matter when – unofficially. One of our license plates had rattled off somewhere in Mongolia but I was determined to keep the other one but I had to take it off stealthily, which I successfully did. Then it was time to say goodbye to el Doblo. She done good.

    There were a couple Aussies at the yard at the same time so we all shared an uber back to the finish line. There was an awesome and empty massive bar there with wi-fi. The only thing left to do was to find a flight home. I had tried the day before but the airline sites were timing out for some reason. Getting home from Ulan-Ude isn’t exactly tricky but it requires flying to Moscow first, which was the part I was having difficulty with. The flights 2 days later were filling up and the tickets went from a little over $300 to $500 by the time I was able to book a ticket. Flights from Moscow were surprisingly cheap from being so far away, somewhere in the $500 range. Thankfully I remember to check the American Airlines website because it just so happened I had enough miles to fly home from Moscow for free AND first class the entire way. After 6 weeks on the road a little luxury was a welcome surprise.

    Mitch had flown home early that morning but Ryan and I were still in town along with the Birch brothers as well as Hendrick and Dave from Starsky and Dutch. We decided we should find a nice restaurant that night for dinner, which we did sort of. Honestly don’t remember a ton of details because as soon as my flight was booked I hit the beers once again to celebrate with more of the teams that were arriving at the finish. We hit a few bars that night and then unfortunately all had to say goodbye. Ryan and I didn’t fly our respective ways for 2 days (that crazy son of a bitch flew to southeast Asia after our trip) but everyone else left in the morning.

     

     

     

     

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    Day 44: The home stretch

     

    8.5 hours of smooth roads and a border crossing was all that stood between us the finish line. 360 more miles on top of the over 11,000 we’d already done. Our fuel pump was on it’s last legs so we’d be limping to the finish line. The Doblo was trying to give up on us but we just wouldn’t let it happen. The end was within reach.

    We probably all planned on hitting the road early, but that just wasn’t going to happen after the previous night. We probably hit the road around 10 or so and all decided it would be nice to have some good old fashioned American food, so we found a Burger King on the way out of town. A whopper definitely hit the spot. From there we hit the road on our journey back to the Russian motherland.

    A couple hours in I think we realized it was going a little slower than we hoped. We had heard the border was going to take a few hours to get through, so we wouldn’t be getting into Ulan-Ude until well after midnight. During a pit stop for fuel Rich decided to make a lovely addition to our Doblo.

    Once we realized that we weren’t going to make it by midnight we slowed our roll a little bit and even stopped in some random town to have a beer. We walked into this pub and the lady shooed us off into this back room. I’m not sure if it was privacy hospitality or not. Whatever!

    The closer we got to the northern border of Mongolia the more the landscape changed. It’s possible we hadn’t seen a single tree since we had been in the country, but all of a sudden it felt like we were driving through the countryside vineyards of Italy. I don’t have a picture of this sorry, but you can picture it I bet.

    We probably arrived at the Russian border around 8pm, and it was a weird shit show. At first it appeared closed off, but after wandering around for a few minutes we found out that it wasn’t closed, they were just letting only a few cars through at a time. There weren’t too many cars in front of us, but it was clear we were going to be there for a little while. It was getting late so we decided to make some noodles and wait it out.

    While we were waiting our car got swamped repeatedly by locals that wanted to buy any and everything off our car. The gas cans we had were specially of interest. On the plus side, I met a Dallas Mavericks fan! Who would have thought half-way around the world. I’m still curious how he got that sweatshirt.

    Eventually we got through and then the next shit show began. There was zero instruction from any of the guards and apparently I skipped a step and ended up further in the process than I should have been. The guard that inspected our car kept insisting on some small piece of paper in broken English. I dug through all our paperwork but we didn’t have what he was looking for. That’s when he said I needed to pay a fine, and by that he meant bribe. Having gone through this before, I just played really dumb and eventually he pointed me towards a small building that was just past the gate when we got in. I was supposed to show the car docs there and get my exit stamp for the car, after which you’d be given the little slip of paper that the other guard was waiting for. Whoops. On to no man’s land where we waited for another hour. The down time did give me time to wire up the light of C that we had pilfered from somewhere in Ulaanbaatar. One of the guards got a real kick out of it. Real shame we didn’t get the silly stuff wired up until the day before we finished.

    That was the Mongolian side. The Russian side was even painfully slower. It was however equally as confusing as once again the guards weren’t making clear the order of windows and what not we had to go through. Our car got yelled at a few times for getting some paperwork done before it was our turn. That’s when I met sleepy Sergei, the head honcho (I’m assuming.) There were only 2 guards clearing the cars through, one of which was doing the paperwork for all the locals. Lucky me got to deal with sleepy Sergei who handed me a form entirely in Russian and told me to fill it out. What? Google translate wasn’t working very well, so I kinda just sat there for a little bit trying to figure out what on earth the form said. That’s when I noticed a notebook on another desk that looked very worn and was filled with laminated stuff. I don’t know why but I guessed there was info in there, and sure it enough there was a copy of the form in several languages. After cross-referencing and muddling my way through the poor translations I eventually got it completed. Then sleepy Sergei just kinda looked around doing nothing for a while. Then he picked up my form and index finger typed the thing in. Like I said, painfully slow.

    After that there was more waiting until a group of other guards decided to search a car. Like a few other times that I had noticed, once again it was clear that a lot of thing that happen in Russia are strictly for show and I guess some people don’t better. A female guard walked around the car with a drug dog, pointing at random points in the body. Then she had the dog jump in and sniff around.

    Wait, I typed that wrong. The female guard walked around the car with a disinterested chihuahua who was not smelling anything and wanted very little to do with the whole process. Another guard came up to us and said something like “Marijuana yeah? It’s very cool. Do you have some marijuana for me?” I gotta say he was really close to tricking me into pulling out a stash of marijuana, but not this time. I think he needs to work on his script if he wants to bust anyone.

    We were finally back in Russia, and we only had a few hours to the finish line. Problem was it was between 1 and 2am and no one had any desire to drive through. There it appeared to be a medium sized border town, so we figured we would drive around until we found a hotel. We found like 4, but none of them would take credit cards and no one had any Russian money left. So we had to drive around looking for an ATM – which we did – and then went back to one that actually had someone at the front desk. I think I remember this being a whole ordeal, once again going through the process of arguing about how many people could stay in rooms and how many rooms they had. We got it sorted eventually and then crashed for a few hours, too tired to even dream of the finish line.

     

     

     

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