About Me.
A strange but interesting fellow…
I’ve always been an inquisitive fellow, asking lot’s of questions and exploring the world around me, I remember when I was about 5yrs old exploring the drainage ditch of the railway at the end of my garden.
I used to ride everywhere on a variety of less than looked after mountain bikes, and on foot discovering my local area little did I know that there where also what I now know to be called ‘green lanes’ hiding in plain site around most areas I’ve explored,
A natural progression from foot to bike and then much much later scooters then cars led me to explore further and further, after my first car met its end fairly quickly thanks to an unobservant fellow motorist, my wife and I decided to buy new for peace of mind, that then met it’s untimely end due to its poor design (A Chevrolet Aveo) to which I moved onto a cheap newcomer at the time in 2014.
That was my first Dacia, a Sandero ‘Stepway’ I wanted the Duster 4×4 but the birth of my Daughter was due to happen soon and my employment didn’t guarantee hours however it turns out hours were plentiful and so I went back to Dacia in early 2015 and swapped the Sandero for a Dacia Duster 4×4.
I started searching what I could actually use the 4×4 for as I hadn’t really thought about it and then discovered the world of ‘Green Laning’ where the big most commonest of 4×4’s travelled on ‘old highways’, so off I went to try it out, I love my technology and I’m a reasonably good photographer so seeking them out with the aid of Microsoft’s Bing maps which gave free access to Ordinance Survey (OS) Maps
The first few lanes were easy then I headed to a lane a few weeks later in Temple Balsall, just below Knowle in the West Midlands, as I approached this bungalow I could see a nice wide sweeping road going around the edge of their garden so I thought great, easy! as I got round to the back I had a sharp right turn and fell into some ruts on a tight lane, Ruts or rutting occurs when the wear of the road surface from the tyres leaves a deep tyre track, this can be problematic because the centre of the unworn road can ‘ground out’ your car essentially pushing your tyres off the road surface and thus losing grip!
This was my first ‘scary’ road, all I could hear was the car dragging itself across the centre of the road you can see that experience here: https://youtu.be/pRfPaVoDC2I
When I came out the other side I feared the worse, after all this car was barely 6 months old!” I quickly pulled into a pub car park after escaping what I felt was certain doom and looked underneath… NOTHING! not a mark not a single thing broken this then led to me doing more and more…
I tried to find some friends to ask questions to but there was so much negative feeling towards anyone driving an untested unheard of brand so that’s when I decided to create my own friends and launched ‘The Dacia Duster Explorers 4×4 Group’ on Facebook the problem was that even then Dacia drivers were just normal people none of them had considered going on adventures on green lanes so how could I start encouraging them too? Well that’s when I started using my love of computers to start making videos, the idea was simple go do the lane, get it on video to prove I’ve done it then that should give confidence for those drivers to see what to expect and drive it in their own dusters, it was and still is hard to get Duster owners to try it even ten years on but the videos have proved useful not only for researchers, councils and other 4×4 drivers that I still continue to make them today!
Due to this I’ve even discovered lanes that no one has knew about either due to mapping errors or they’ve been lost to the wilderness so what I do has developed beyond just videos and I feel that my place in the ‘Green laning sphere’ has vastly helped the community and those other communities that revolve around these amazing spaces.
I’m not your average, social media influencer explorer, you might think I’m a bit strange with my rants on Facebook or how I come across in real life but rest assured I’m just a brutally honest person and I mean no harm! I hope you enjoy discovering my adventures either in my car or on my scooter (I don’t just explorer green lanes!), Keep an eye out on YouTube for my videos, Facebook for all the latest news and plans and watch me in near Realtime on the live tracking right here on the website.