THIS STORY begins a long time ago. In 1989 in actual fact. The Range Rover had been introduced into the United States a couple of years previously, about the same time that I, and a couple of colleagues, had tentatively launched Land Rover Owner magazine in the UK.

The Range Rover was an almost instant hit and LRO was doing quite well in the US as well. The magazine’s success in the States was greatly helped by the contribution being made by an American journalist, Jim Allen, who was deeply into his ‘four-wheeling’ in general and Land Rovers in particular.

Jim wrote many great features for LRO (and quite a few for LRM in later years, too) and I had confided in him my envy for the stunning off-roading opportunities that he so often featured in his articles. Well, why not come over and try them for yourself, he suggested.

Yes indeed, why not?

plains and canyons

Bill Baker, then heading up the press, PR and communications efforts

at RRNA (Range Rover North America), agreed to loan me a current model Range Rover for a week or so and off I toddled, camera in hand, for my first ever visit to California. Everything about the place I found fantastic, not least of all the Anza Borrego desert right in the very south of the state and an off-road driver’s paradise almost beyond compare.

Jim and I hacked that Range Rover though canyons, over mountains, across vast desert plains, down dirt trails and along thousands of miles of tarmac. We criss-crossed the desert for days, testing the vehicle to its limits.

The Anza Borrego’s nearest ‘big smoke’ is San Diego. The coastal city sits atop the Mexican border and rubs shoulders with Tijuana, though it is anything but big or smokey. I remember it was one of the cleanest cities I had ever seen and its clear fresh air and beautifully temperate climate seemed to make it a most enviable place to live.

Trying, as you do, to photograph the Range Rover against some cool backgrounds, I had parked it in front of the Star of India, an iron hulled ship built in the Isle of Man in 1863 and moored along San Diego’s waterfront. Today it is the world’s oldest active sailing ship. It wasn’t exactly a prize-winning photograph but, like that whole trip to Southern California, it stuck in my mind over the years.

a charming city

Fast forward, if you will, to 2009. A family wedding led Cathie and I to Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles and, during a bit of spare time, we rented a car and nipped down the 100 miles of coastal road to take a look at San Diego as it is now. Well, let me tell you it hasn’t changed much. A few more high-rise apartment blocks and some new business buildings but, essentially, it is the same charming city it was 22 years ago.

So you can imagine how pleased we were when Cathie’s son, Brett and his wife Noel decided that San Diego was the place for them and that they would move there permanently. Cathie and I were fortunate enough to be able to acquire an apartment of our own – quite literally just across the street from the Star of India – and now we make a couple of trips there every year.

Brett drives a Discovery II which they have taken all over the States including an epic 3,000 mile drive from New Jersey to San Diego with their cats in the back and their furniture in a Penske truck with Noel’s Dad, Mike, at the wheel. We can use the Disco in San Diego when we visit, but it’s not quite the same as having your own vehicle.

And so a cunning plan was hatched – let’s import ‘Jude’, Cathie’s 1955 Series One into California from the UK. Cunning indeed, but would it be possible?

Initial research was encouraging and it soon became apparent that vehicles over 21 years old, can be imported into the US with relative ease. It’s a rolling system so, this year, a vehicle would need to have been manufactured before 1990, and so on. 

For any vehicle younger than that, it’s pretty much of an impossible, or at least impractical, task. Beware, too, that vehicles built after 1976 will need to pass a current emissions test – not an easy task for a 200Tdi.

Actually, it seemed a bit too easy, which was ringing alarm bells, so I made a quick call to Mark Griffiths at the Huddersfield Land Rover Centre who specialise in Land Rover exports amongst other things. Oh yes, he said, a vehicle of that age would be no problem, and he gave me his shipping contact.

Having checked and checked again the legality of what we were trying to do, I got a few quotes for shipping Jude across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to the Californian coast and finally got up the courage to make a booking. I settled on using Ship Overseas, an international car shipping company based in San Diego, but there are many others from which to choose.

Ship Overseas’ quote came in at $2,020 for the boat journey itself, $250 to truck the vehicle from its destination port in Long Beach to San Diego, and $350 ‘destination charge’ – things like customs clearance and so on. $2,620 (about £1,600) for the whole deal. It didn’t seem bad given the 5,500 miles journey and that it can cost a couple of hundred quid to get your car across or under the 25 miles of the English Channel.

The quote came with a whole load of helpful information including the fact that Jude would be travelling on a Roll-on Roll-off (RoRo) vessel and that we would not be allowed to pack anything into the vehicle, it would have to be empty. We also had to decide on Jude’s value and based it on the fact that we’d paid £7,500 to buy her a couple of years back and converted that to $12,700, but I suspect that a rarity like a mint condition 1955 Land Rover in California might add a bit to that. We wired the money, having decided to take the optional insurance at $190, and waited for our instructions.

Ship Overseas had sub-contracted the UK part of the operation to Global Logistics UK and an email from them advised us to have Jude at Southampton docks no later than 1100 hours on December 10, 2010. I knew that the Land Rover would have to be clean and it’s quite a few miles from Bury St Edmunds to Southampton, so figured a trailer would be the best bet.

And so it was that, early on the morning of December 9, Cathie and I loaded Jude onto the trailer for her last ever trip across British tarmac. Our plan was to make Southampton by lunch time, drop Jude off at 40 Berth, and be back home in time for Eastenders.

Nice plan. Pity about the M25.

With the motorway closed, us at the tail of the stationary traffic and Dock Gate 4 closing at 4.30pm, an unscheduled overnight stop in a Southampton hotel became an inevitability. Oh well, at least we had a couple of hours to do the necessary the following morning – what a disaster it would have been to have missed the boat entirely.

in good company

The morning dawned grey and damp and we made the short journey from the hotel to the Eastern Docks where the man on the booth didn’t seem to have a clue where we were supposed to go. A bit of driving around and a couple of helpful directions later we found 40 Berth.

Wow, I had no idea.

Car transporters were pouring in, one after the other, all packed with brand new Range Rovers, Range Rover Sports and Discoverys. Our boat – the Hoegh Chiba – was, it appeared, also taking hundreds upon hundreds of Solihull’s finest off to distant shores and it seemed that Jude would be crossing the Atlantic in exalted company indeed.

What a nice touch, and totally unexpected.

It all seemed very informal and not to say a little unnerving as we found our representative working out of his car on the dockside – I’d expected a flashy office at the very least. We had needed to buy a new battery the day before and I feared potential starting problems on the journey, so hurriedly got some masking tape and marker pen to make up some signs to warn who ever needed to be warned that the vehicle is positive earth. I also made up a note to advise on the starting procedure as not every one is familiar with a Series One’s charming quirkiness.

And so it was that Cathie got her documents, our man got the keys, we set off on our journey to Suffolk and Jude headed off, alone and confused, to line up with the big shiny Rangies (it was like something out of Thomas the Tank Engine) for a new life in the Golden State.

It seemed like a bit of a leap of faith. There was our precious Land Rover handed over to people who sort of seemed to know what they were doing (which of course they did) to make a journey onto, around and off a huge car transporting vessel in the company of new and highly sophisticated motor cars. 

What could to wrong? Well, Jude could break down at any moment – it had happened before, you know.

I feared electrical gremlins, I feared mechanical breakages, I feared vandalism, I feared carelessness from the crew, I feared refusal by the US customs to allow the vehicle into the country. In fact, I feared quite a lot.

All we could do was trust in the system and try to enjoy Christmas.

what’s the plan?

The plan – there’s always got to be a plan – was to fly out to San Diego for Christmas, be there to receive Jude at the California end and tuck her up safely in the garage. We got to California on time, but only by the flookiest of luck – remember the weekend just before Christmas when Heathrow was closed by snow? Ours was one of only 15 flights to leave the airport that Sunday.

Anyway, thanks Virgin Atlantic for getting us there only a few hours late.

Unfortunately the same could not be said for Jude. The Hoegh Chiba had diverted to Germany (who knows?) and would not be arriving in Long Beach until a couple of days after we were due to leave. No amount of frantic phone calls can change the fact that if a vessel is at sea, it’s at sea and isn’t going to get into the dock any quicker because you’re giving the girl from the shipping company a hard time on the phone – ya cannee change the laws of physics, Jim.

So we flew home with Jude still a few days out, leaving Brett to organise delivery to the apartment block. My only gripe about the whole business ensued when the trucking company delivered Jude to the Ship Overseas office instead of our apartment, then refused to bring it the seven miles further without a payment of $150 – mean, I would say.

expert advice

Jude spent the next few months in her parking spot recovering from her ordeal and looking forward to Easter when we would meet her again and see about getting her registered with a nice set of California plates. I deemed it wise to use an agency to get the registration done – I could have done it myself but could imagine waiting in a line somewhere for a couple of hours only to be told that I hadn’t brought the right documents.

We went to Coronado Registrations and a very nice lady there took Cathie’s details and our address in San Diego, as well as Jude’s UK registration document and the necessary credit card numbers. We went back a couple of days later to collect the registration documents and Jude’s new plates.

As with any vehicle movement across international borders, it’s essential to make sure that the VIN number on the vehicle matches the registration document. Being a 1955 vehicle, Jude’s VIN is laughably short, but it is stamped on the chassis and on the vehicle ID plate on the bulkhead.

who’s the owner

Just one fly in the ointment, though. We’d handed over the vehicle’s UK registration document which the California authorities refused to accept as proof of ownership – probably because right there on page one it says, in capital letters, ‘this document is not proof of ownership’. Difficult to argue against that, really.

Annual registration fee is based on vehicle value. Our total, including a fee to the agency we used, was around $250.

Jude is now legally registered to Cathie in California but, should she ever wish to sell it, she will have to find a way to prove legal ownership so that the US admin people can issue her with ‘title’ to the vehicle. Anyone know how you prove ownership of a 1955 Land Rover that you bought from a mate three or four years ago? 

So Jude now has a new home in the California sun and is loving going topless in the almost endless sunshine. Americans drive slower than we do, so Jude is well suited to the surfer dude lifestyle.

But she is a 1955 Land Rover and she’ll soon be making a trip to British & European who specialise in Land Rovers in particular, to get her brake lights fixed, and her indicators sorted out and perhaps some new tyres more suited to comfort than authenticity. 

Jude may be sunning herself under California palms, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to be any less high maintenance.