Show Notes for Podcast Episode #51
Interviewing Paul May, Land Cruiser Owner and Overland OG
Summary:
Matt Scott and Scott Brady interview longtime overland OG Paul May. Paul has been working in the overland market for two decades, and has assembled deep insights into travel and vehicle preparation. His vehicles have included a 40, 60, 100, and 200.
This podcast is supported in part by:
Host Bios:
Scott Brady
Scott is the publisher and co-founder of Expedition Portal and Overland Journal and is often credited with popularizing overlanding in North America. His travels by 4WD and adventure motorcycle span all seven continents and includes three circumnavigations of the globe. His polar expeditions include two vehicle crossings of Antarctica and the first long-axis crossing of Greenland. @scott.a.brady
Matthew Scott
Matthew is a leading expert in automotive adventure. He has extensively explored the world’s most remote places by 4WD and is considered an industry authority on overland travel. He is the only American to ever become an editor of a major Australian 4WD publication and has over 15 years of competitive auto racing experience. @mattexplore
Full Transcript:
Paul May Interview
[00:00:00] Scott Brady: Hello and welcome to the overland journal podcast. I am your host Scott Brady, and I am here with my cohost Matt Scott.
Matt Scott: Hello.
Scott Brady: And we are very fortunate today to have one of the OGs of overlanding in North America and a close personal friend, Paul May. Thank you so much for being on the podcast man.
Paul May: Oh, it’s my pleasure, my honor. Thank you for having me on.
Scott Brady: Well you were telling Matt and I that you’ve actually listened to all of the podcasts.
Paul May: The whole kit and caboodle.
Scott Brady: So what are some things that you think we could do better about the podcast?
Paul May: I think you guys are spot on. I think you’re doing an awesome job.
Matt Scott: Particularly me I’m really good. Right?
Paul May: When you’re here…
Scott Brady: Matt has lots of cool things to do and the podcast is just one of them
Paul May: He’s got plenty of on his plate. I’m sure of it. What I really enjoyed about it and maybe it’s… I dunno how to say it, but it’s all these people that I have met and that are friends of mine that you guys [00:01:00] have interviewed and I’m like, yeah, I know the reason he’s coming from, I picture their face sitting right here. It’s been a wonderful experience for me.
Matt Scott: And now you’re sitting right here.
Paul May: In this hallowed seat.
Scott Brady: Well, you’re not on the podcast just because you’re our buddy, but it is because you have lived a very interesting life and you have traveled extensively yourself, including probably a dozen trips by now to Africa, if not close to that.
Paul May: Getting closer.
Scott Brady: And you’ve traveled a lot also in north America, you’ve owned a lot of different Land Cruisers. I’d love to just let this conversation flow through some of where you’ve come from. And then those little nuggets of those gems of experience that you’ve had along, along the way with your journeys. So maybe just give us like where did Paul come from?
Matt Scott: Yeah. Who is Paul?
Scott Brady: Who is Paul May?
Paul May: It’s been a wonderful life. [00:02:00] I’m very fortunate. My parents, we’re all for travel and I grew up traveling in travel trailers of all. We had an Aristacat who was a single axle. Ran around in that in the early seventies, in the mid to late seventies we had a double axle Prowler and we went all over the place in that. I also was involved in a lot of early activities with the Scouts and we got out a bunch in there. So in 75, my parents took me on a month long around the country tour. We left and I was in the, in the backseat of the Ford Country Squire.
Scott Brady: Country Squire. That’s awesome.
Paul May: Yeah and it was a bad Country Squire. I mean it was mean. My dad would fly by all the guys in the pickups with their trailers, and he was just hauling it past the guys and he’d just wave and smile. Yeah, and it was a pretty impressive car, but we did a trip from salt lake to Albuquerque, to Texas, to Florida, to New York city, to Chicago. I mean all around the [00:03:00] country. It just opens your eyes to there’s a different world, right, especially at 10 years old. When I was in that early timeframe I also started getting into the outdoors. Scouting was a big thing and so all my friends were getting their trains and their Hot Wheels, and all those things and for Christmas I’m getting Kirkham’s backpacking tent and a down sleeping bag and the hard frame backpack and all this stuff to go camping and getting out. When I was 12, we did a 60 mile backpacking trip for eight days and hiked from Utah through Kings Peak… From Wyoming to Kings Peak and out into Utah. That hooked me on the outdoors part of that. So from there man, anytime that I could get away, I mean, I drove when I was 16. I took off in the car I had at that time and slept in the front seat of the car and in Newport beach.
Scott Brady: Oh, sweet, and at 16. That’s legit at 16.
Paul May: Ran off and [00:04:00] did that.
Matt Scott: That’s something that you can only do at 16.
Paul May: Yeah… well at 22 as well. I slept in the front seat of my 2002 tii and saw Salida for a couple of days. So we were getting out and doing that stuff.
Scott Brady: I bet you wish you still had that car? Like those 2000 twos have just gone through the roof in the last five years.
Paul May: I used to drag race muscle cars on State Street in Salt Lake City back in the day. It was a lot of fun. So yeah, a lot of wanderlust involved in that and that moved me into traveling a little bit more for just personal enjoyment and every dime I made after college and getting up through all that stuff I spent on traveling the Southwest and getting out and doing more and more and more. It was a lot of fun. I had a blast with it and you know, that all who wander are not lost kind of thing. That was my mantra for a long time. Got into vehicles. Trucks, started out with a 67 Scout [00:05:00] right-hand drive male Jeep. So that was the called the skateboard mobile in college. Went to a CJ3A at Willy’s. 40 was the top speed in the thing, but it would climb a tree, so we’d flat tow that down to Moab.
Scott Brady: Yeah. I’ve been wanting to buy a CJ2A or a CJ3A for a very long time.
Matt Scott: I want a CJ5. I don’t know why I can’t explain it.
Paul May: It’s a V8 in them.
Matt Scott: That can explain it.
Scott Brady: Yeah you can get a 304 in it. Yeah, for sure.
Paul May: So I had had that 3A and then a friend of mine was deeply involved, and still is, with Land Rover in Utah. So I got into… I had a series 388 that we’ve put a full Defender interior in it and rebuild the engine in that. Then I had a series two-way 109 right-hand drive out of Wales. For a little while. I couldn’t trust either of them out of the town.
Scott Brady: When you were driving around the town, you were awesome. You were on safari in Salt Lake.
Paul May: Yeah they were cool. I mean, very sexy.
Scott Brady: Super cool.
[00:06:00] Paul May: Very sexy vehicles.
Matt Scott: Did yours stop? Cause my 10928 did not stop.
Paul May: If you put your feet out on the ground.
Matt Scott: That was the most effective way to do it.
Paul May: Yeah. I went through a lot of sand…
Matt Scott: They had some kind of master cylinder that had like a little air pocket and the factory prescribed method was to park the vehicle on a 45 degree slope. So you can bleed the brakes.
Paul May: I’m not gonna do that.
Matt Scott: I’m just not going to have breaks.
Paul May: I’ll just go slow and downshift.
Scott Brady: Yeah, that’s right. Your Land Rover was awesome too Matt. I remember that. Wasn’t it like from a game park somewhere or…
Matt Scott: It was imported from, I want to say somewhere that was right-hand drive. So South Africa or England, I was thinking South Africa based on the fact that there was no rust and then it lived I think it was like the out of Africa game park somewhere in Texas.
Scott Brady: Oh, that’s right.
Paul May: That’s right. I remember the blue [00:07:00] with branding on it,
Scott Brady: Ralph, the Land Rover. That thing was awesome though.
Paul May: Mine wasn’t so lucky. It came out of Wales and it was bucket of rust, but it looked awesome. Broke the frame.
Matt Scott: So in the capacity that I’ve known Paul, you have been fanatical about Land Cruisers. Was it the 109s fault?
Paul May: Partially? Yes. A couple of things. One, the old vintage Rovers were a pretty snooty bunch. If you did anything outside of Rover, it was…
Scott Brady: It’s still the same. If you put a tire wider than 10 inches on a Land Rover you’re excommunicated
Paul May: You’re out.
Scott Brady: You’re out.
Paul May: Well, see I love unicorns. I like to see what people can do with them. So I did. I hopped into… well for necessity of something reliable that I could take out of town and drive and wheel and would come back and still be in the same truck. That was one reason. But I also, like, I like to see what people can do with them when modifying vehicles. So, [00:08:00] yeah, I bought a second gen Forerunner back in the early nineties. Proceeded to roll it.
Scott Brady: I remember that story.
Paul May: Yeah. I was up in Snohomish pass and hit black ice and did a 720 on the road and then a horizontal 720 off of the road, full on yard sale. Walked away with a scratch on my nose and the car was dented in every panel and I was like dang, these are pretty good cars. I went right back to Salt Lake and bought me another one.
Scott Brady: The car saved your life. Imagine if you had been in the Land Rover, or any vintage vehicle when that happened?
Paul May: Flat Paul…
Matt Scott: Paul would not be as tall.
Paul May: I would not be around. That’s for darn sure. So it started in with the Forerunners as far as that goes, and I’ve been through a couple of different pick ups and other things. From there, I ended up with the 100 series Land Cruiser. It was actually my wife’s car to start with, because I had another work truck and some other things going on there and when we started up equipped I told my wife, I need a truck to put all this stuff on. She looked at me [00:09:00] square in the eye and she says, I’m not driving a tank. I want a car and that was that. She got a car and I got…
You got a Land Cruiser.
I got a tank out of it. So, yeah. Then we’ve got our progression from there.
Scott Brady: Now on that, on that 100 series Land Cruiser, because that was the one that you had the longest and I mean, we did a bunch of traveling together in that, and you even competed valiantly in the expedition trophies of early days with that vehicle. Talk a little bit about what you really liked about what you did with the vehicle, and then maybe some things that you wouldn’t do again, or that you found were maybe shortcomings of the a hundred.
Paul May: The hundred was a beast of a vehicle and anything I threw at it, it just didn’t seem to care and I put more on it and more on it and more on it. It had everything you can imagine. I was way over. GVWR on that thing and it was a blast and I had a wonderful time and I didn’t want to get rid of it. So I think that what I did is [00:10:00] I overbuilt it. There was just too many systems trying to come out of that one single vehicle. Now it’s still running and still going and doing fine for the gentleman that has it now. I think that was probably the one thing that I would say that I did is I overbuilt that truck.
Matt Scott: Cruisers are so heavy and stout to begin with that they’re easy to overbuild though, you kind of have to put a rear bumper on them, kinda need some sliders. You kind of need this and all of a sudden you’ve got an extra 200-300 pounds of just stuff bolted before you put the stuff in it.
Paul May: Yeah. And I had a a 45 gallon auxiliary tank, so I was carrying 72 gallons onboard that thing I could drive to LA and fill up and drive back.
Scott Brady: Yeah, sure.
Paul May: There was no problem at all. So I think the weight of all that stuff. But other than that, boy that was a lot of fun. A lot of it was built by myself. I did a lot of things. My first rack on, there was an ATV ramp that I bolded together and put [00:11:00] some oddball stuff on there before we really got into the market of what we see today as the overlanding market. You were on your own if you wanted to rack.
Scott Brady: Yeah, there wasn’t a whole lot, and I think you and I first started talking probably around 2004 or so. Does that sound right on timeframe?
Paul May: 2005, fall of five or early six?
Scott Brady: I had been working with Nathan Hinman who was working on some of the EasyOn stuff and then I think you just called me up one day and you’re like, Hey I’m Paul May and I’m the guy who’s bringing in all this cool EasyOn stuff and by the way, thanks for all of the photos and all of the coverage that you’ve been… I mean, you were just very gracious. I remember it was such a… it left an impression on me that first conversation. You were very gracious about it. I remember you being very complimentary of Jess and his [00:12:00] dad and at the time, in fact, I think that that’s how you connected with EasyOn was that you met one of the Stoolers on their way north, right?
Paul May: Yeah, that… I quite honestly… Where I am right now, it wouldn’t have happened without my involvement with Land Cruisers. Quite honestly, it wouldn’t have at all. Back in 2005 I was looking for a change in my life. I’d been working at the same company for going on 20 years, and it was time for me to do something different and Jack Stooler he was a founder of EasyOn and he was on a trip. He was in his sixties and was with his girlfriend and they had put together a Troopy and driven it from Shwaya to Alaska and they came into salt lake and I was in the presidency of our local Land Cruisers club and I invited them to stop and let us see. We never saw Troopy’s. Darn rare, especially 15 years ago. So he stopped and we kinda hit it off and he had all these interesting things on this truck I’d never [00:13:00] seen before and he showed me all of them and he says, you know, anybody would be interested in bringing this stuff to the United States and I started to say somebody else’s name and my wife punched me in the arm, looked at me like you idiot. There’s that look? You get the look right? No words are said. So she just gave me that look and I’m like, oh yeah you’re right, I am an idiot. I said, Hey can we talk about this tomorrow? And I spent a sleepless night, thought it over and decided I’m gonna start a company and told Jack that the next day and we met with the wholeLand Cruiser club and I flew down to Houston when he was packing it up to leave. I said, I’m serious, looked him in the eye. We shook hands and that’s the only deal that we’ve made and it’s been a gentleman’s agreement ever since and I think the Stoolers Jack and his son, Jess is running EasyOn now. True gentlemen, far and above. True Gentlemen, and they are loyal and honorable men and I’m privileged to be involved with that company. So we started out [00:14:00] at that point, I started the company up and our first show was the Easter Jeep safari in 2006. And I show up with this truck and park it down in the middle of that booth area. I’m right across from Casey Highlights and their semi and all this stuff. Right? These guys are walking by with the tank tops and the beers and they’re staring at my thing like I had a third head, and they’re like, what’s that? I haven’t seen anything like that. I talked to the KC guys and they’re like, well, welcome to the super bowl young man and I’m sitting over there by myself like, Hey look at me. I’m cool. And yeah, it was a very interesting start. But yeah, that was kind of the start of the whole thing is we, we brought stuff in ealry 2006.
Scott Brady: And now KC has roof tents on their vehicles. Life comes…
Paul May: Full circle. Yeah it was a pretty interesting start that’s for sure.
Scott Brady: And yeah, my experience with the Stoolers have also been that and in fact, I remember when we were preparing the Land Cruisers. Well, we came into Africa and you were with me and [00:15:00] Greg and Kurt and the team from Expedition 7 in Africa. We did that whole trip together. We did Botswana and the Skeleton Coast, and that was just an, an incredible experience and Jess and Jack, let us just basically store those trucks in their shop for a long time. Months before we sent them off for Antarctica on the E7 experience, what were some of the things that you noticed? Because sometimes I have trouble seeing the forest for the trees, but since you were involved with E7 for that one leg, what were some of the things that you took away from that. Things that maybe you recognize as that’s a really good idea, or maybe that isn’t such a good idea. What were some of the takeaways that you had from Expedition 7?
Paul May: I think the biggest thing I took away was your philosophy on the builds on the Troopy’s out of that, and how you took great care to make sure that they were light and nimble and functional. You had a lot of capability that you [00:16:00] probably would never use. But you had it in case something happened. You had an ability to take care of everybody in your crew, if you lost one of them for some reason. I thought that was pretty cool. I mean, it was a different take than I had taken on vehicles at that point. You know, I was throwing all this stuff at them I could. Of course, I’m in the market. That’s what I do. I sell stuff. So you show the stuff. Right? And I still do, and I still have that stuff on there, but I thought it was a really good way of going about that. It’s preservation of assets and some of the things you’ve taught me early on too. That one was really cool. I also learned that there is a rev limiter on a 60 series… or a 70 series Land Cruiser with a four speed. When we were out in the… I got to ride with the gentleman that was our scout. Man he just wraped that thing out. Yeah the trip out in Skeleton Coast. So I got to ride along with the guy figuring out where we’re going, and he was high marking this thing like a [00:17:00] snowmobile.
Scott Brady: It was incredible. He was so good at it and he had like a colostomy bag. It was just like the most unusual experience. I mean, he was just this ninja on the dunes, but you know, he just needed his magic carpet. It was incredible how well he could drive.
Paul May: And we had these fairly heavy trucks for what they were, but they were underweight, but still a heavy truck. Kind of lumbering behind *Slow tuba sounds* going across this thing, and he’s like *Over worked engine sounds* I was like hair on fire. Oh God, this is awesome, and that was a lot of fun. First helicopter ride that I ever took in my life was on that trip up in the Okavango. In that Delta there and getting up in that glorified Volkswagen beetle was…
Scott Brady: Ann R-44. It’s the most deadly helicopter ever made. It was perfect.
Paul May: It was perfect. It was such an awesome feeling to be up and above that and see all that going on.
Scott Brady: The [00:18:00] wildlife. Right?
Paul May: Yeah. The wildlife was impressive. Even out in the Skeleton Coast. The wildlife was impressive for sure. Four days out there by yourself in the dunes and there’s nobody.
Scott Brady: Yeah, we were it.
Paul May: Driving on Ruby Sand.
Scott Brady: It was incredible.
Paul May: Seeing those ships locked in on a thousand meters from the coast, just things ingrained in my memory and I will never forget it thanks to you guys. So it was a wonderful trip.
Scott Brady: It really was such a great time. And I was, I remember when we first started getting into the dunes and the 70s were just struggling, we weren’t even a half a mile in, and we weren’t even in the big dunes yet and these trucks were struggling…
Matt Scott: Well those dunes are big.
Scott Brady: They’re big. They’re really big and I remember there was a couple of members of the team that were… they were starting to get very nervous and like we haven’t even made it a half a mile yet and we’ve got to go hundreds of miles [00:19:00] and I just kept saying, we’re going to find the right tire pressure. We’re going to find the right tire pressure, and we kept getting lower and lower. I think we ended up running those trucks, as I recall at about 10 PSI in the rear and about 12 PSI up front. We did, lose some beads on the wheels, but it was the only way you could get them through. Was just very, very low pressures.
Paul May: And good spotting.
Scott Brady: We had great drivers and stuff like that. I mean, showed how amazing of a driver Curt is to haul that 79 filled with all that fuel and everything.
Paul May: Like it was just yeah. I haven’t yet to find anything that affects Curt.
Scott Brady: Yeah. He’s unfazed.
Paul May: He’s cool with whatever. Break the truck in Greenland. Okay. We can get out and fix that. Whatever it is Curt is on suede in his activities. That was cool. The other thing that I really remember is going down the dunes. Okay. So sand can only effectively get to a [00:20:00] 45 degree angle on the sand, but you lean over those sand dunes and they would growl at you. You get the car *Sand growling sounds* right in the sand, because there’s so much air in those sand dunes cause they’ve been blowing around. We’re compressing that air out of them. The growling that came out of these hills as you’re going down… I had never heard that before.
Scott Brady: I’ve never experienced that in any other sand dunes. So in Peru, in the Gobi, any other sand dunes, I’ve never experienced that growling effect. It was unnerving. It was like a lion… you got to go back, man.
Matt Scott: I got to go back.
Scott Brady: You got to go back.
Paul May: It was awesome. Wonderful time.
Scott Brady: Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. I think E7, all three of us have been on that in various stages.
Matt Scott: I want to go back to Africa. You’re talking about Africa. I’m just like, nothing else matters anymore. I don’t care about Moab. I don’t care about the Mojave road. Take me back to Africa.
Paul May: I’ve had some wonderful experiences over there and I love going over [00:21:00] there.
Matt Scott: It’s just not what people think it is. You know, I feel like there’s a strong apprehension. Like I always get people that ask me, aren’t you worried about being there? I’m like, well if I went home to Chicago, I’d be a little bit…
Scott Brady: Way more worried.
Matt Scott: I’d be a little bit more worried than, you know, like the worst thing that’s going to happen in Namibia is you’re going to starve to death because there’s no one there, which means there’s no one there to commit a crime.
Paul May: Yeah. There’s I think four or five cities in the United States that are more dangerous than Johannesburg in the list of crime issues. Yeah there are issues.
Matt Scott: Johannesburg still sketches me out. Let’s be straight. I remember when you picked me up at the airport, you’re like, we gotta be careful driving and I’m like, we’re on the highway. He’s like, yeah we gotta be careful driving at night.
Paul May: There are issues. Don’t get me wrong. There are certain issues, but there are issues everywhere. There are certain areas in Los Angeles I don’t drive. Or Chicago or [00:22:00] east St. Louis or you can pick them out and you just don’t go there. Or if you do, you go with people.
Scott Brady: Well, and I was picking you up at the airport in a G-Wagon and I’m like, we’re going to just like stick to this one route. It was like 10 o’clock at night.
Matt Scott: That was right when COVID was starting to be a thin. And I remember like, it was like the last trip.
Scott Brady: Yeah, it was the last trip we were all on.
Matt Scott: Dang. That’s a while ago.
Scott Brady: Totally. What was your favorite trip in Africa? Even if it’s, you know, let’s not assume that it’s E7, what’s been one of the most memorable adventures that you’ve had on that continent.
Paul May: I’m going to say a couple. Had a chance to go with Jack and Jess out to Kruger national park and travel all over that park. Also went with you and we went up and did that incredible trip with that…
Scott Brady: Midiqueway, right?
Paul May: Yeah. I think it was in that Impala that ran into the side of the…
Scott Brady: And the wild dogs. Yeah, I wasn’t… that was. [00:23:00] So Matt and I have been having a conversation about Africa and I said, man I’m just telling you from my own screw up. Do the morning game drives because I was the one guy who was like, oh, I’m going to sleep in this day and Bruce and Paul and whoever else, I mean, maybe CS was there too. They all go out and an Impala runs into the side of the game truck, like center punches, it knocks itself out. And then a pack of wild dogs devour it right over the… like right next to the vehicle.
Paul May: From me to you, it was like air breathing Parana. I mean, they left like three bones out of this poor little animal and you’re looking at it, you’ve got your camera in your hand. You’re like, uh…
Matt Scott: Should I be taking pictures of this?
Paul May: And all of a sudden it’s all gone and off they go and I was like, good God, crazy stuff.
Scott Brady: And I missed that one. That’s what I told Matt. I’m like, Matt, I missed the coolest thing.
Matt Scott: I’ve got a hundred days until [00:24:00] Tanzania.
Paul May: That was a good one. I had to get Kalahottie on the other side just below Namibia, beautiful place. Lots of animals outside, but the… its gonna sound funny, the most memorable trip that I’ve had over there. I went with Heather and it was more of a touring thing. We flew down to port Elizabeth on the Southeast coast and we rented a Mercedes and they decided to upgrade us to a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I was less than excited about that whole thing. Come on, really? Come on. Where’s the Merc? We did a garden route, the whole Southern coast. Went to the national parks and rented one of their cottages in the national parks and saw that all happen. We bungee jumped off the highest bungee jump on the planet. It was a 670 foot crevasse that we jumped off a perfectly good bridge by our ankles and did that was…
Scott Brady: How did that feel?
Paul May: Fun.
Matt Scott: Did you feel [00:25:00] noodley afterwards? Like, did it like kinda… I imagine that you get a great back crack.
Paul May: What they did is they lined you up by size. Well, guess where I was. Right? So I got to watch all of the people in front of me lined up there. And the first one the gals are a little bit scared. And so what they do is they touch you all over. Like Heather was up there getting ready and she was getting all nerved out. And so they were checking things, you know, and they kept her mind busy. So she’s watching them, check them all, you know, check all over and they said, okay, we’re going to count to three and you’re gonna go one, two, three. That’s all I heard was waaaah. There goes my wife off the thing. And then she comes back… they go grab you with a winch. It’s like a high-speed like one of the 82-74 winches. Right. They drop a guy down on a cable hook you on and winch you back up to the bridge and then I did the jump and I was a heavy guy. I think I went the furthest, I mean, there’s enough time to scream twice, you know, if you want to breathe in and scream again go ahead. It was a lot of fun.
Scott Brady: And all the teaming crocodiles [00:26:00] down…
Paul May: We were a ways up from the bottom there, but it was quite a good jump. We went from there, ended up south of Cape Town and went out with the sharks. Went out on the boat and went swimming with the sharks for a while.
Scott Brady: Great Whites?
Paul May: Yeah.
Scott Brady: Oh, incredible. How was that?
Paul May: Cool. All sorts of cool.
Scott Brady: Now, are you on like a rebreather or a regulator to align to the boat or you have your own tank on, or how are you staying underneath?
Paul May: So what they did is they set it up as cages off the side of the boat and so the cages were going down about six feet in depth and they had about two feet of air above. So we all had tanks and we were all in the gear, and so you’d climb into the cage and the sharks were out and about. So you could get your breather and go down under the water and be like me to you from these Great Whites that were swimming around.
Scott Brady: Wow.
Matt Scott: Did they care about you or were they trying to eat you?
Paul May: No, [00:27:00] they swam by with the one eye. Don’t stick your hands out of this place. So they really honestly didn’t give a crap about us being there, but it was really interesting and we got to see some of them… one of them was about half the length of the boat. I bet it was like close to 20 feet. I’ve seen 20 feet long, and videos of the whole thing. We did that. That was kind of cool, jumped off Lion Head on a parasail and did all sorts of fun things that were just more of an adventure for us in a personal sense then driving off in trucks and going rrr, this is really cool but we’re in the middle of nowhere. I love that, but I also love just going in for the sheer adventure of being in a new place and finding new things. Both sides of that.
Scott Brady: Oh, no question. Yeah, you got to have the full spectrum. It’s like Matt and I have talked many times about like, how do we get beyond the truck? Maybe that’s a mountain bike, maybe it’s hiking. Maybe it’s that you just want to go to that beautiful winery at the end of the day, or you talked about doing a [00:28:00] bourbon tour coming up or something like that. I think including those other elements is so important to the trip.
Paul May: Feed in other things that you can cause the people that are there know what’s going on. So not all of those little touristy things are bad. It’s a lot of fun.
Matt Scott: I’m just thinking about, about wine planning that trip around wine at this point.
Scott Brady: Just like a rose tour?
Matt Scott: A rose tour of Provence, but we can call it overlanding.
Paul May: Somehow. Overlanding…
Matt Scott: It’s a pretty empty term at this point anyways.
Scott Brady: Yeah. I mean, it’s now completely up to interpretation.
Paul May: Adventure vehicle travel, right?
Matt Scott: Adventure vehicle travel…
Paul May: Yeah, so if that Porsche is adventurous… have at it.
Scott Brady: Yeah. It could be a Porsche from rose winery to rose winery [00:29:00] in the south of france.
Matt Scott: That would be a really great idea, except I wouldn’t really make it past the first one.
Paul May: Yeah. It could be an issue.
Matt Scott: So you have a 200 series now and you like it?
Paul May: I love that truck.
Matt Scott: It’s kinda like it’s your baby.
Paul May: It’s my baby. Second baby though. Yeah, I do. We took the hundred series as far as I think it could go. We were one of the first people to really build up a hundred series and so there was a lot of folks that looked at that. We traded it in for a fifth gen Forerunner 2013 trail edition.
Matt Scott: I remember that one. That’s when you were in Prescott.
Paul May: Yeah. We bought that and built that up and Clay and his crew took that as an impetus to start their Forerunners too. They looked at a lot what we did with that Forerunner and said, Hey man this is a great platform. Wonderful truck. Did anything I asked.
Matt Scott: I remember you saying that in dimensions it was very similar to a hundred series.
Paul May: Very much so.
Matt Scott: Even though it looked slightly smaller than a hundred. I thought that’s something that’s always kinda stuck with me.
Paul May: A very capable truck. [00:30:00] It hauled my little AT Chaser around better than the hundred d did with the V6. The one thing I’d kept on telling everybody is the reason why I like it more than the hundred. Is because it was lighter, but the worst thing about it is that it was lighter.
Scott Brady: Yeah. It felt lighter.
Paul May: Yeah, lighter. The metal was a little bit lighter. All the things about it made it a more efficient vehicle. Right? And so it outperformed the hundred. No question. But it was… I miss my hundred. I missed my hundred and so we ended up getting a white 2013, 200 series and that vehicle… I haven’t found an equal in my eyes there’s not an equal to that vehicle.
Scott Brady: Yeah. And just this morning, we went out and did a nice video shoot on that. So all those that are listening, you’ll see that come up on the YouTube channel expeditionportal.com or Expedition Portal on YouTube. You’ll see that come up soon, but what I really noticed in this particular build, having seen so many of your projects is that [00:31:00] this really is like the full culmination of your experience as a traveler and as a vehicle builder and it’s just a really thoughtful truck.
Paul May: Thank you.
Scott Brady: And what are the things that you like most about this one? What are the couple of modifications that you’ve done that you most liked about, or that you most appreciate?
Paul May: Well, to start out with good tires and suspension. I try my best to keep it as simple as possible and most, I don’t know… durable as possible. The ones that I really liked, the work that goose gear did on the interior back when goose gear had time to do things. They’re very busy now. But I had a custom goose gear built out in the inside equal to the weight that I took out of it of seats, put it back in there with a lot more functionality. Now I can sleep in that vehicle. When I run by myself, I scoot the passenger seat forward and Chatelet forward and I’ve got six foot seven inside. So I throw a thermarest down and a sleeping bag and just like the E7 trucks, I’m getting full circle here. Like the E7s, [00:32:00] sleep inside. You got a lot of visibility, a lot of protection you can get out of something fast if you need to. Especially if you’re solo. That works out really well. One of the other things that I figured out, it didn’t take long, is on a trip to Australia I looked around looking for roof racks and there aren’t any roof racks on vehicles. They’re all running load bars and the reason why is because of the weight restrictions on the vehicles, right? So guys are trying to run light. So all those load bars, instead of racks is saving weight. Load bars are working just as fine under a roof, hard shell or a soft shell rooftop tent. It’s redundant to have a rack underneath that in that scenario. So I’m running load bars on mine instead of a full rack. Just about all the weight in that vehicle is below waist high in my vehicle.
Matt Scott: That’s cool.
Scott Brady: Well, I was watching it on the trail today. I mean, we went through that very crossed axle, downhill obstacle, and the vehicle was very settled even with a roof tent and awning up top and the vehicle was really… the [00:33:00] F-250 tremor that I was driving was like dancing rear wheels. Like, let me wheel lift to the moon on this side and then wheel lift to the moon on the other side and your truck was totally stable.
Paul May: Yeah. I mean above chest high in that vehicle in there has been maybe 350 pounds and that includes the roof of the vehicle. So there’s not a lot of weight in relative terms to the rest of the vehicle above waist high on that. So it’s a good fit.
Scott Brady: Is there anything you’d do different with that truck if you were to build it again? Something that you’d leave out or use a different solution for?
Paul May: No.
Scott Brady: Cool.
Paul May: Not one thing. In the older vehicles, I did a lot of electrical. Built up all sorts of systems and relays and switches and doodads and bells and all this stuff. I’m down to a six circuit, a blue sea fuse block. I didn’t need all of that stuff. Now with led lights, you don’t need all the relays. You don’t need all that stuff.
Matt Scott: You have all the switch pros, switch S pod triggered things.
Paul May: You can, but I [00:34:00] don’t. You don’t have to do any of that. If you’re into that. Awesome. What I found is when I built it in there I never used it. The hundred series had a hot water system in it. I had a hot water heat shower system built into the thing. It was like a $2,000 gizmo. I used twice. Come on. That’s a lot of weight and a lot of unnecessary stuff, so we’ve really tapered it all down and blended it all out and this is the umpteenth build on a truck. So I’ve got it down to what I want and that’s fine with me. I’m good with that.
Matt Scott: I’ve definitely found that as I build more vehicles less is more, you know, like with my Gladiator, I tried to make it a little sailboat and I now kind of regret that because I have all this weight and all this complexity and I’m like, well I could have also just had a fan and a light in there and probably have been just as happy. But Utah… So you are from Utah, born and raised raised. So [00:35:00] for those listeners who haven’t been. What’s the one thing people should see in Utah.
Paul May: I’d say just don’t come.
Matt Scott: I’ve heard it’s really bad and dangerous,
Scott Brady: Super dangerous.
Paul May: No, Scott’s alluded to this over the years and I’ve heard him say it in quite a few places. He’s been a lot of places. This guy here, he’s been a lot of places and his favorite place is Southern Utah. I would agree a hundred percent. I know I’ve been traveling Southern Utah for going on 40 years and I have not seen it all. I know a couple of our friends I’ve seen more… Probably seen it all, but I have not seen it all and it is just spectacular. There’s nothing else that I have seen on the planet like it.
Matt Scott: Well, there’s such diversity of terrain in Utah, you know, you have Alpine and then you have these like other worldly rock eroded sculptures.
Paul May: Yeah. From the arches area with three national parks [00:36:00] within that range. Bryce Canyon’s amazing. Zion is amazing. The whole Escalante area is impressive. San Rafael swell. I mean, I can go on for forever and I’ve done a couple of seminars at some of the events that we’ve done. Where I’ll sit down and for an hour, I take out the paper map the Utah state official paper map, and I laid it out and I started in the north west corner of the state and then I go to the Southeast corner and I say, go here, see this. This is a great camp spot. Don’t miss a burger at Ray’s in Green River.
Matt Scott: Oh you took me to Ray’s.
Scott Brady: Another place that we’ve all been together is Ray’s.
Paul May: You point out all the things that you could spend, a couple months easily doing nothing but going on a route around the state and it’s life changing for me. It’s my life. That’s what I really enjoyed to do is southern Utah.
Scott Brady: And I think when it, when it incorporates like Anasazi ruins, like we just did a trip with Sinwei [00:37:00] and Maggie McDermott and some other folks, and we’re at this campsite and Sinwei was like, oh by the way look at that, and like we couldn’t even see it, but we were up on this Promintory and there’s this canyon right behind the campsite, and he’s like look at that. I looked down and there’s this huge Anasazi ruin.
Matt Scott: Ancestral Puebloan is what they prefer to be called now.
Paul May: It is.
Scott Brady: Yeah. I see what you’re saying. I got you.
Matt Scott: It means enemy Anasazi.
Scott Brady: Oh, got it. Are there any Anasazi left? I’m just wondering who’s protesting the term.
Paul May: Most Indian tribes.
Matt Scott: Most Indian tribes.
Scott Brady: No, that’s good. That’s good to know.
Paul May: Just the general thought of, Hey we need to pick up our game on that one.
Scott Brady: So Ancestral Puebloan is the better…
Paul May: I think so yes.
Scott Brady: Okay. Gotcha. Cool. Awesome.
Matt Scott: I don’t know. I don’t want to call you out.
Scott Brady: No, I appreciate it. That’s the only way you learn right. Is getting called out. I just didn’t know.
Matt Scott: There’s actually a lot of terms in the west that are, [00:38:00] I’ll use the term westernized. Like the San Francisco peaks in Flagstaff. It’s kind of an insult to call them the San Francisco peaks. There’s actually like a traditional name for them. I dunno.
Paul May: Getting back to previous lives and the naming of all these things. Yeah I mean Utah, boy, through and through northern Utah’s beautiful. There’s a lot of Alpine there, but there’s Alpine in Southern Utah too. We drive up to over 10,000 feet in Southern Utah and get way above treeline. If you want to do that kind of stuff. It’s a lot of fun too. But there’s so much area to cover.
Matt Scott: And it’s so accessible too. I think that’s like really the cool thing for people that are considering planning a trip to Utah is that there’s not a lot of private land. So much of it is public. So much of it is accessible. I mean, I love it there.
Paul May: Yeah, I do too. So as far as one place to go…
Matt Scott: Do you guys ever find yourself, you’re in wherever and you’re like that looks like [00:39:00] Utah.
Scott Brady: Yeah, totally do. Except that there’s so much of that in Utah. I mean, the fact that you’ve got… I mean, Canyon Lands alone. It seems like you could spend a lifetime exploring that.
Paul May: Oh and the backpacking options down there is endless. You guys ever been to Cappadocia Turkey?
Scott Brady: No. Yeah, you went there recently.
Matt Scott: They do the balloons there right?
Paul May: Yeah. They do the hot air balloon flying above that and it was kind of a crossroads between the east west and on the silk route. Kinda in that area coming down from from, well, the crossing there in Turkey and it’s impressive. We went up and did the hot air balloons. I had a friend that was in the military over there and so we went over and said hi, and he took us around there a little ways. But that whole area reminded me of Bryce with different colors. I went by the way they made caves in Bryce. But yeah, they had hundreds of years of people living in the caves in like Bryce canyon, only white. You go [00:40:00] around the world and you’re like, yeah that’s like here, that’s like that. You assimilate it to home.
Scott Brady: Yeah, for sure. Oh, that’s oh, that is such a cool experience. So I’d love to go to Cappadocia . That’d be awesome. Then there’s another kind of vehicle that you have a particular love for and that’s that gen one Tundra, you are definitely a fan of those things.
Paul May: I think its the most underrated truck Toyota has made.
Scott Brady: I think you’re right and it’s almost like you don’t want to ruin it by getting the word out there that they’re still one of the best. I mean, it has the four seven V8, which is one of the most reliable motors Toyota ever brought to the United States, and it’s got plenty of power, and it’s not as big as a full truck, but it’s also not as compact as a Tacoma.
Paul May: You know the gen three Tacoma’s, gen one Tundra is about, I think somewhere in the range of an inch wider and an inch longer than the Tacoma now, but you’ve got a [00:41:00] V8 in it and this one that we have, we call it Sleepy.
Matt Scott: That’s the one that’s supercharged.
Paul May: We put a supercharger on it. Kurt Williams our good friend, he had, as far as we know, the last inbox on the shelf TRD supercharger in the United States and we put it on this truck and another friend of mine installed it. He was a master tech instructor Will Carol.
Scott Brady: He does amazing work.
Paul May: Genius, you know, with the wrench. So he put it on there, so I knew it was all done right. That thing moves. It now has the same horse and torque as my gen three Tundra, but it’s the size of a Tacoma and we put airbags on it. So I call it like three quarter ton V8 Tacoma. But it has the ability to hold the weight more properly than the Tacoma’s do and it has the power to handle all that stuff. Yeah, I think it’s the most underrated truck there is.
Matt Scott: I think there was a period in time when almost every mechanic that I knew drove a first gen Tundra because they didn’t want to have to work on anything.
[00:42:00] Scott Brady: That’s so true. Mechanics don’t want to work on their own cars.
Matt Scott: Look in the back of the car dealer or whatever. You’re going to see mechanics driving first gen Tundras. They just… the only thing that wears out is the paint.
Scott Brady: True. No, they do seem to all be losing their paint.
Matt Scott: I think that was when they kind of were just switching to water-based paints. Kind of around that area, like late nineties, early two thousands.
Paul May: Right in that range they were starting to do some oddball paint stuff, but yeah, we love that truck. We love that truck. Everybody fights to drive it. So yeah, it’s been fun.
Scott Brady: That’s awesome and then what are some of the other projects you’ve got going right now?
Paul May: Well I’ve got and FJ 40 and that I’ve had for 20 plus years and we started using that for display and other things and that’s one of those unicorn vehicles that I was telling you about. I’ve had that the longest now it’s got a five seven Vortec in it and 37s and blah blah. It’s a lot of fun. That’s my summer driver, you know, the midlife crisis, little red convertible. 20 years ago. But the [00:43:00] one we’re building right now is a 1983 FJ 60 and it’s a really clean, really clean truck.
Scott Brady: Where did you find that one at?
Paul May: A friend of mine in salt lake city was selling it. He found it, it was a Texas truck and it’ll make obvious sense in a second. There’s a Texas truck that a gentlemen bought for his wife. She wanted a land cruiser. She drove it once and they parked it for five years and so he picked it up and shined it up a little bit and did a couple things and then I took on the project from there, cause I I’ve always loved the sixties, but the drive train in it is the unique thing. It has a Ford, 351 Windsor race engine in it. With a Dana transmission transfer case in it. It’s a 400 horse V8 in the 60 series and it looks stock. I mean, from the outside, you look at it just like…
Scott Brady: That sounds terrifying. It sounds like that’s like a really quick way to end up dead. [00:44:00] Cause that car does not stop or turn either.
Paul May: It’s fine. It’s not going to go out and I’m not in drag racing, but it’s fun to have. Well, of course, maybe a little, not like the 200, we’re not going to go lightning fast on this one, but it’s fine. You you load it up and you pull up to somebody in their Mustang, you know? And they’re like *reving sounds* you hit *reving sounds* right next to it. They look at you like, what the hell is that? It’s fun. So we’ve been keeping it pretty stock. We added a few odds and bits.
Scott Brady: Sounds totally stock.
Paul May: Totally stock… not. Just don’t look under the hood. That’s kind of fun.
Matt Scott: The worst thing about the 60 is the engine. I mean, I’m not saying that it’s not reliable, and stout, and it’s gonna run forever. But it’s an incredible tractor engine. It’s a FJ 40 with a really nice body.
Scott Brady: They’re slow.
Matt Scott: They’re slow.
Scott Brady: That was my first Land Cruiser, was a 1983, FJ 60.
Paul May: Really? Fun.
Scott Brady: That was [00:45:00] my first Land Cruiser. I didn’t own it for very long, because it was just me driving and I’m like, why do I need such a big car? So I found a guy up in Flagstaff that had a growing family and an FJ 40 and by some like Providence, like we were talking about earlier, he needed a 60 and I wanted a 40 and we met up at Lake Pleasant and we drove each other’s car and we signed each other’s titles over and we both went home in the other vehicle. It was the craziest exchange I’ve ever had in my life. There was no money exchanged. There were worth basically the same amount of money and he got a super clean grandpa driven 1983 60, and I got a FJ 40.
Paul May: Awesome. Both good vehicles.
Scott Brady: Great vehicles.
Paul May: Those are going to stick with me for a long time.
Scott Brady: Yeah, that’s cool. No reason to change that one.
Matt Scott: I love the way sixties look.
Scott Brady: They do look great. It’s like classic.
Matt Scott: I haven’t had a 200 and I haven’t had a 60. Those are the only two Land Cruisers.
Scott Brady: You had a hundred?
Matt Scott: Oh and I haven’t had a hundred. Okay. So this is all just crap. [00:46:00] I was thinking that it was like…
Paul May: You need to pick up your game.
Matt Scott: First. I started saying no, it’s the only one that I haven’t had and then I’m like…
Paul May: The guy that swaps through cars like toilet paper and you haven’t had those what’s up with it.
Matt Scott: I don’t know. I should fix it.
Scott Brady: I think so.
Matt Scott: Got to wait for those containers.
Scott Brady: Because you had an 80 very early in life.
Matt Scott: I traded a Land Rover discovery for it, which was like my first car. At that time, I couldn’t afford to fix the rusty exhaust on the 80 series. I remember driving it to Mall of America and the brakes just… Lines just burst on the highway and I’m like, what the hell do I do?
Scott Brady: What did you do?
Matt Scott: Crimped them off, rebled them and went to Mall of America. I didn’t need rear breaks.
Scott Brady: Yeah, totally overrated.
Paul May: Completely.
Scott Brady: I mean, I don’t even know if you can notice the difference if an 80 series has rear breaks or not… they don’t [00:47:00] stop.
Matt Scott: I love the 80s though.
Scott Brady: They’re amazing. The brakes is just something that I tend to take issue with.
Matt Scott: I closed the chapter on the 80 series, but it was a nice chapter.
Paul May: Yeah. Awesome trucks.
Scott Brady: Yours was amazing. That was a very cool project, Matt, for sure. One of the things we also like to ask, Paul, is books that you have come to love or maybe books that you’ve given to others many times because it’s made such a difference for you. It can be anything at all. What are some of your favorite reads as Paul May?
Paul May: I’ve been dreading this question.
Matt Scott: Is it mad magazine? That’s how I would answer.
Paul May: Pretty close, in a different vein. In high school, I tried to be deep on my thought I was going to be philosophical and you know, like Albert Camou and heart of darkness, you know, the whole apocalypse now. But what I liked about that was, is somebody that went far deep into Africa and found himself, but what he found [00:48:00] was a God-like person taking over everything and its surroundings. Very interesting deep… I’m not a deep guy. I found that out after reading some of that stuff, I was like, yeah no…
Matt Scott: What’s your favorite beer, Paul?
Paul May: I’m going to stay on the books for a second.
Scott Brady: And then we can talk about your favorite beer.
Paul May: Some of the things Jon Krakauer put out into the deep… or Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. Both analogist to our lives here. As far as too much crowding in one area can be catastrophic if you’re not taking care of things correctly. Or if you go too far in the deep by yourself and things can happen out of your control sometimes.
Scott Brady: He’s just such a, not only a wordsmith, but that research that he does to paint a picture of something that in both cases were tragic.
Paul May: Very tragic situations, but it makes you think more. Preparation and making sure that you know, what you do is going to be okay. I love those things. You know, this is going to sound really weird, maybe not. But I really like… I’m a Jimmy Buffet [00:49:00] fan. He wrote a book called a Pirate Looks at 50, which is a play on a song of his, it was called Pirate Looks at 40 and it was a story in an autobiographical way and it talks about him and where he started and what he did. So I almost kind of like emulate that guy. I think he does an awesome job. He runs an incredible billion dollar enterprise in bare feet. And Mario, our friend Mario has a great analogy of it is like a duck. You see a duck on the water and it looks like it’s just cruising and having, you know, just ease handling life with ease, but you get down under the water and those little… those little legs you’re doing this the whole time. Constantly. But if you look at Jimmy Buffet on the outside, do you think this guy is just this laid back, hanging out Hawaiian shirt, shorts, barefoot.
Matt Scott: But he has a billion dollar empire, and $500 margarita machines.
Paul May: And flies a sea plane and does incredible…
Matt Scott: You said sports mobile?
Paul May: Yeah.
Scott Brady: Yeah. He did.
Paul May: He has a sports mobile out [00:50:00] on his stuff back on the Eastern coast and he’s been all over the planet, and he goes and explores tropical places and exotic places in Africa and all over the place. He’s been everywhere, but he does it his way and his way doesn’t have shoes and I can understand that completely.
Scott Brady: Yeah. I think I’ve seen you wear shoes a few times. I mean, I, I think maybe cause we had to hike somewhere or whatever,
Paul May: It was required…
Scott Brady: Yeah exactly. Maybe if you went to Antarctica, you would put shoes on. Maybe.
Paul May: Maybe some socks.
Scott Brady: Some socks?
Paul May: So I mean do I hand out books? Am I that guy that does that much reading? No. I went to school. I went to grad school and I gradually learned, I didn’t want to read any books anymore. I’d did enough of that. So I listened to stuff you know, the military mystery, thriller kind of stuff. It gets me across the thousand mile days. It’s brain dead stuff. A lot of fun that way. But other than that…
Scott Brady: I always find it fascinating [00:51:00] what people… what they identify with in that way.
Paul May: Yeah. A couple autobiographies. I said it right? Barack Obama’s a Promised Land.
Matt Scott: I haven’t read that.
Paul May: A pioneer in a different way. He had a lot of upward struggles. The other one that might sound kind of odd ball is Matthew McConaugwey.
Scott Brady: Oh, I’ve heard that that’s a…
Paul May: McConaughey, excuse me. Green lights.
Scott Brady: I’ve heard. It’s great.
Paul May: It is. His life has been an adventure in its own right. He was a nomad. He bought a vehicle and he bought an old Airstream and he wandered the United States for a couple of years. Once in a while, he’d go back and make a film and then he’d get back in the truck with his dog and off, he goes again, wandered the whole country.
Scott Brady: Sounds like, yeah. Sounds like you in about three weeks.
Matt Scott: You’re about to pick up your first Airstream.
Paul May: Yeah, yeah. Super excited about this.
Matt Scott: You can get your Margaritaville margarita [00:52:00] blender in the air stream.
Scott Brady: And you’ve got your dog and you can go wander around the country. You can be Matthew McConaughey.
Matt Scott: Pretend that you’re at a Lincoln commercial.
Paul May: Not as good looking.
Scott Brady: That’s all up to interpretation.
Matt Scott: It depends on which movie he’s in.
Paul May: True, he can look terrible if he wants to. No, but I found it very humorous. It’s not been an easy life for him. Some of it has some of it’s not, but I took a lot away on being yourself. Hmm, being true to what you want to be, find your goal. Live it, find a way of making that happen for yourself and that’s what he’s done. He’s done a good job af doing that for himself.
Scott Brady: Thats a great suggestion.
Paul May: It’s cool book.
Scott Brady: Okay. So now we’ve got to ask you about your favorite beer. Cause I remember in your historic home that you had downtown Salt Lake, you had a beer fridge. It’s only job was to maintain the ideal temperature of I think a Red Stripe and there was something else in there.
Paul May: Frosty Barley Bops of all Nature were in that [00:53:00] fridge and it was a full size fridge. We had it out in the garage and at any given time, I would have a variety of somewhere between 25 and 30 different beers from all over the world stuffed in that fridge. The new house has a beer fridge. It’s just slightly smaller version of the original. So favorite beers? My go-to right now is a Full Sale Amber. I’m getting into the amorous more. The IPA’s. No interest whatsoever. Yeah.
Matt Scott: Male frappuccinos.
Paul May: Something like that. Anything that makes these things right here in your neck, anything that makes those clench you shouldn’t drink.
Matt Scott: And then you get cotton mouth afterwards when you have an IPA.
Scott Brady: Oh, interesting. I, yeah. That’s why, I guess I’ve never even tried one.
Matt Scott: The IPA thing’s interesting. Right? Because it was like, here have this beer that tastes like dandelions and then somebody was like, Oh I really liked this, totally lying. And then his friend next to him was like, oh, yeah I like that too, and then it became like a…
Scott Brady: A thing.
Matt Scott: It became like a, I’m not going to admit that I don’t like this. [00:54:00] At least that’s my opinion from the Pabst Blue Ribbon drinker.
Paul May: Maybe it’s an acquired taste. I’m hoping, I’m really hoping that’s the case and I have not acquired that and I’m fine with this.
Scott Brady: Yaeh Amber is a great way to drink.
Paul May: Its a great one. Or Pails or something in that IBU under 30. I’m good with that. That’s just fine with me. So yeah, I got hooked on Red Stripes for a while. It was a very dangerous sport. Utah’s known for some very interesting liquor laws and so I knew exactly every entrance to the state of Utah on where to pick up the stash on the way back in to the state. One time coming back from from Nevada, we stopped by a liquor store in Mesquite with the chaser trailer and I brought back, it was like 10 or 12 cases of red Stripe in the trailer.
Scott Brady: Now I know why you bought a Tracer Trailer. It was your bootleg…
Paul May: Cause I could adjust the air pressure on the suspension.
Scott Brady: It wasn’t [00:55:00] sagging or anything like that?
Paul May: No no no it worked out great for a long time. Now you get a little bit better on their whole process. So it’s not as bad.
Matt Scott: Utah actually had some fantastic microbrews. They were kind of ahead of a lot of the rest of the country because of their laws. If I remember that correctly.
Paul May: Yeah. They’ve done some incredible things to make beers with not much alcohol in them taste really good.
Matt Scott: I actually like that idea. Like if I can get like a full bodied beer that was only, 3% or something.
Paul May: You can just drink a lot more of them.
Matt Scott: Well, I don’t know if you’re a fan of Pacifica Light. But that is my Baja beer of choice, because I can sit… it’s a maintenance beer. I can sit down with like a rack of it and then at the end, I’m like, I’m rehydrated!
Scott Brady: I feel slightly bloated, but totally hydrated and not drunk at all.
Paul May: You can drink those all day long.
Scott Brady: So what’s next for you, Paul? Where, where would you like to travel next? You’ve got this Airstream that you’re picking [00:56:00] up. What’s your goals for travel over the next couple of years?
Paul May: With that in particular, we’re going to do a lot of Americana. I’m really looking forward to… I’m kind of going the other way as far as people are like… like I gotta get away from all the people and I gotta… I’m going to go and see some things that are not in the way out. So yeah, we’re going to go do the Smokey Mountains and we’re doing a craft bourbon tour for a week and seeing some of the countryside. Going up into South Dakota and seeing some of the Americana stuff there. I’m hoping to cross coast to coast Canada. I think it would be a lot of fun.
Matt Scott: I think that’d be great. Do the Trans Canada highway.
Paul May: Yeah do the full thing and my wife and I are fortunate enough now that where we are in our position so we can work remotely for the most part. So we’re going to go and try that. We’re even looking at staying for a while, a few months at a time remote. If we can work it out, there’s still some bugs to work out of that, but more of the Americana stuff and the vehicles that we’re hauling this trailer around with are standalone in their own rights. So if [00:57:00] we get a bug up her nose and we want to go, Hey let’s go over there for a couple of days and climb this impressive, really hard technical thing. Alright. And just unhook the trailer.
Matt Scott: Thats the cool thing with the trailer is you can really just leave it.
Scott Brady: Yeah, that makes sense.
Paul May: Yeah. So the travel trailer that we chose is light enough that we can haul it around with the 200, and we’ve got everything on that 200 that we can live on its own. So it’s like the base ship in the satellite, you know, X fighter cruiser, we can head out and do our thing, or the Millennium Falcon. Just get away and we could go and do the really nasty stuff if we wanted to and not have a problem. So looking forward to that adventure.
Scott Brady: So as we get close to the end here, I think that you should talk about why your Land Cruiser is called the Millennium Falcon. I thought that was really great. So you have one sticker on the vehicle.
Paul May: One little white cutout it’s of a Millennium Falcon and what I liken it to is that it’s a large cargo vessel [00:58:00] that’s white with black highlights on it, and it’s capable of going like a bat outta hell. That’s exactly what…
Scott Brady: I’ve seen you drive Baja in 6 parsecs.
Paul May: Pretty dang close. Not as fast as some of my friends, but I’m keeping up with them better and better. Yeah, it is. It’s it’s our little Millennium Falcon and does the job just right.
Scott Brady: I do remember when you came out to Prescott and you wanted to start doing some higher speed driving you and I spent. About an hour perfecting your Scandinavian flick in a 100 series. That was really fun. That was a good day.
Paul May: That was an awesome day. My wife gave me a birthday present of Scott Brady training. One-on-one this is early, early on.
Scott Brady: Yeah. This is when I actually did training way back then.
Paul May: But even before the Overland training thing and I wanted to learn to drift and it’s not easy to drift a fully kitted, hundred series all wheel drive truck, but we got it.
Scott Brady: Oh, we did. Yeah.
Paul May: We also proceeded to break an entire case of red Stripe in my fridge on one of those. You were trying to teach me how to [00:59:00] do speed bumps and we ended into one of them. I spent three hours cleaning the fridge out of glass and about two gallons of red Stripe after that. It’s a sad day, but I got over it, but one of the coolest highlights of my life is drifting that hundred.
Scott Brady: I totally remember that. I mean, we perfected it with heavy trailbreaking so it was just like last second of a turn monster brake application, so left foot braking trailbreaking and the, the rear end would lighten just enough and it would start to rotate. And then I’m like Paul full gas and he’d roll into full gas and it would just… It would pitch around the whole corner. It was beautiful.
Paul May: Then right after we got that done, he goes, stop, stop, stop, stop. And I’m like, hit the brakes. What, what do I, and he goes, that was so awesome and we were high-fiving.
Scott Brady: Yeah, that was a good time. That was a great day. That was really a great day. Awesome. How can people find out more about you and about what you do?
Paul May: Equippedone.com is our website Equipped Expedition Outfitters that [01:00:00] has everything to do with our business and what we’ve got going on. You’ll find all the vehicles that we have on there and a lot of the stories. There’s a Facebook page linked off of there. Instagram off of there. My personal Facebook and Instagram are pretty darn boring. I’m kind of off the grid on that kind of stuff. So if you want to find me, just look up Paul May and you’ll see my ugly mug in there somewhere.
Scott Brady: Ex Overland did a nice piece on your truck, not all that long ago. So I think you can find that on YouTube, on your 200 series.
Paul May: Yeah. In the shop, is there their series that they did up in their thing, and we’ve been fortunate enough to work with them for a decade now. I heard you mentioned that the plaque that you got from… they gave one to us too, and it’s in our shop.
Scott Brady: Oh they’re amazing people for those that are listening to the podcast. If you don’t know about X Overland, make sure that you check them out on YouTube. And I think that they’re also on Amazon.
Paul May: Amazon Prime and they’re running some of their shows from a few years ago. Equipped was their first sponsor. We met them at one of your events out in [01:01:00] California. long, long time ago.
Scott Brady: Wonderful people. So any, any other questions you’ve got Matt for our man Paul?
Matt Scott: No.
Paul May: Its it time for a beer yet?
Matt Scott: It’s time for a beer. That’s my question, is where’s my beer?
Paul May: In my truck.
Scott Brady: Okay. And on that note, we thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next time.
