Europe’s largest overlanding exhibition is the Abenteuer Allrad Show held in Bad Kissingen, Germany over 4 days in June every year. This is where we first came in 2012 to choose a builder for ‘the Truck’ (the vehicle currently known as ‘Cuthbert’). The show has lots of overlanding stuff and, being in Germany, there is naturally also plenty of beer and würst on offer too… so what’s not to like? (click here for link).
On the day before the formal opening of the show, we parked Cuthbert in the designated campground with a rapidly accumulating crowd of camper-trucks. If you plan to head to the show with your truck/camper, we highly recommend getting there at least on the Wednesday morning to get your spot. The camp-ground fills up early! Some campers arrive even the weekend before the event and spend the week there. It’s a pleasant walk into town and there is a free bus service up to the main show-ground on the show days.
When Cuthbert arrives in a campsite he tends often to be amongst the larger of the trucks in the ground, indeed he is usually the biggest by some margin. But not at the Abenteur Allrad Show!!! Here there are monster-trucks of a scale dwarfing Cuthbert, making him look like the Mini Cooper of the camper-truck world. All the main manufacturers of camper-trucks and 4×4 vehicles are there, showcasing the latest trends in camper-truck construction and gadgetry. Then there is stall after stall of the overlanding associated guff that the well-equipped overland traveller just has to have (because of course, we all have soooo much spare room in our trucks to store all this ‘essential’ stuff!)
We had a great four days both at the show and at the very sociable camp-ground populated with like-minded overlanders. The weather was fabulous and we made lots of new friends. First we met up with our friends Peter & Heike (drivers of a Cuthbert sibling truck, the original Iveco Daily 4×4 camper-truck from Bocklet), then Roger & Sue from the Silk Route Club (Sue freshly arrived from a stupendous overland cycle from Cairo to Cape Town – big respect!). The next day Darren and Clare from Bimobil UK parked up next to us and proved to be a poor influence on our alcohol consumption over the next 3 days! On the Friday evening, relaxing with a beer outside Cuthbert, a friendly voice came from behind us: “Allo… Markuus?” Some very nice Cuthbert fans from France, Co and Eric have recently bought a camper-truck similar to Cuthbert for a forthcoming trip around Africa and been following our travel blog over the last year. We were very pleased to meet them and have arranged to visit them in Reims later this summer. Very sociable this overlanding stuff!! 🙂
Cuthbert is now back in UK for a couple of weeks receiving some attention to his ‘stop/go mechanism’ (installing a super new shiny electro-retarder). At this point you now have a bewildering choice of two future options to look forward to:
Option A: If the term ‘electro-retarder’ is not alien to you and you have at least a passing interest in the braking systems of the Iveco Daily 4×4, then you may enjoy the technical update of Mararcus’ work on this (click here) or….
Option B: If you have absolutely no idea what an electro-retarder is and (like most sane people) you care even less, you may prefer to await Cuthbert’s next travel-blog up-date when we hit the road again in a few weeks time (click here).