#ml320

We greatly appreciate your patience as we paused on our posts.

To recap, last week, my husband and I were driving the CLK55 when some asshat decided that he needed to be in the lane we were in, without noticing that we were already there. He hit the passenger front of my car, pit maneuvering himself and sending us both into the median, jumping curbs and hitting each other 2 more times.

The good news is that the CLK appears not to be a total loss. The bad news is we expect it to take months to get fixed. The worse news is that I likely tore something in my shoulder, and my husbands back has been sore ever since. We’re both scheduled for an MRI and regular chiropractic visits. While the initial impact wasn’t bad, going airborne jumping the curb wasn’t exactly a cake walk.

Thankfully, the entire incident was caught on my dashcam. If you don’t have a dashcam, let this be your sign to get one. They’re often under $50US, and can save you thousands. In my case, the other party flat out lied to police and insurance. My dashcam proved him wrong, and his insurance has accepted liability.

We’re thrilled to report that we will be resuming daily posts this week, and are going to be going to a number of car related events to bring you new content!

We also bought another project… a German POS, that isn’t really German. In fact, it’s colloquially known as the “Alabama Trashcan.” Yep, that’s right, we bought a W163 Mercedes Benz M-Class. More specifically, we bought a 2001 ML320.

Why? I want an overlander, and these old MLs were wildly under appreciated. The W163 came standard with true, full time four wheel drive, with a two speed transfer case. They had more ground clearance than all of the competitors at the time (Explorer, Cherokee, Range Rover, etc), and even had a secondary air inlet to act as a snorkel for water fording. While the prices of Jeeps, 4Runners, and other common overlanders skyrocket, we paid just under $4,000 for this example.