Daniel Marcello’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a Land Rover Defender he rented with nowhere to go. It’s the middle of February, and his plans to drive Iceland’s famous Ring Road—an 825-mile trek about the same distance as a drive from Boston to Charlotte—have been interrupted by a hurricane snowstorm featuring 125 mph winds. Soon enough, Marcello and a friend are snowed in. Stuck. He describes the experience—which included sleeping in that driver’s seat for two days, running the engine and blasting the heat constantly—as “pretty bad.” Having a bottle of whiskey on-hand didn’t hurt. But for Marcello, the struggle is kind of the point.

As the owner of Brooklyn Coachworks, a small, clubhouse-looking garage on the west side of Williamsburg, Marcello is in the Land Rover business. A Google search for his dojo will tell you he’s a dealer, but it’s really so much more than that. Marcello is running an assembly line of vintage Defenders, just like the one he briefly lived in back in Iceland, and taking them to the next level. Sometimes that means a start-to-finish rebuild, with new leather interiors, modern technology on the dash, a fresh paint job. At other times, which have become more frequent in recent years, he’s rigging these vehicles up for overlanding—a motorsport he not only indulges in, but takes to the extreme. Or at least the “pretty bad.”

“I like being very minimal with it, because I like the scariness of not knowing I'm going to get out,” he tells me with a straight face, standing in the middle of a gang of Defenders in the lot outside his headquarters. “I don't know. That's not comfortable for a lot of people, I know that.”

Overlanding isn’t just a motorsport, it’s a lifestyle. And while it’s growing in popularity of late (sure, call it a trend among adventure seekers), the practice dates back to the 1900s, when Australians started carving out routes for traveling across the country, according to MotorTrend. What separates overlanding from its fellow motorsports like off-roading are the extremes. Like Marcello mentioned in regard to his own approach, overlanding is about pushing the limits. Seeing the unseen. Charting new territory—not unlike its original Australian execution, and similar to the way waves were chased during the surfing boom of the 50s and 60s in California, Hawaii, and Southeast Asia. Overlanders are looking to go where no one’s gone before. But they’re also looking for challenges, and in Marcello’s case, challenges on steroids. Overlanders fight their way through muddy terrain, scale boulders, and cross bodies of water (kind of like you used to when playing Oregon Trail as a kid, but in an SUV instead of a covered wagon.) The routes overlanders travel on vary from well-known and shared abound to newly discovered and best-kept secrets.

Along the way, you’re not stopping at a motel to sleep. Your vehicle is your home. Your kitchen. Your shower. And yeah, your car. Some of Marcello’s Defenders are built out to do all of this comfortably on the road. Marcello’s own overlanding endeavors aren’t what your average enthusiast will encounter. Sure, overlanding is about survival, self-reliance, and discovering uncharted pockets of the world. But the extremes Marcello likes to take his trips to include minimal provisions—both for himself and his car—just to see how close he can get to the edge.

Even minimalists like Marcello need the right tools, though. Outside of the aforementioned luxuries, there are a few things you’ll want to have on hand.

“I would say a winch is very needed. Good tires, a winch and a recovery point, because if you ever get stuck, you’ve got to get out. That's essential. Having tools, yes. But if you don't know how to fix a car, then you don't know how to use a tool, so it doesn't matter. Water is really good. I've been stuck for a while and I wished I had more water, which is kind of scary,” Marcello says with a smile.

His secret weapon, though? A global community of Land Rover fanatics and club members. Talking to him, it sounds like there’s not a place in the world where you can’t find a fellow Defender head. A lot of times, it’s what gets him out of a jam. Here’s just a taste of that, via a recent trip to the overlanding motherland.

"I've been stuck for a while and I wished I had more water, which is kind of scary."

“We fucked up the truck in Australia pretty bad. We were on this trail and I blew a differential in the front driveshaft on the first day, going off of this crazy trail, Monkey Gum Trail. People run it pretty hard. We’d just bought the car, we flew in, we bought it, hit the trail, and we blew it up. I'm calling my guy, Land Rover Heaven. He's about three hours away. We couldn't get out of the trail. I had nothing to even mobilize any tires, but my winch was power driven by a clutch. So, I had a winch line. We got out of this trail running a winch line at 1,000 feet. Just towing it the whole time. We got it out. Then my buddy came with his military defender and was like, ‘Yeah, we'll tow it to Land Rover Heaven.’ We're going like 80 mph on the highway in the middle of the night for three hours with this.”

When they finally got to Land Rover Heaven, which is “in the middle of fucking nowhere,” the proprietor had the differential Marcello and his friend needed. All it cost them was some social media trade. Marcello took some photos of a vehicle to post on Instagram, and in return he got his differential, and more. The community comes through yet again.

When they left Land Rover Heaven, they noticed a car tailing them, flashing them. They pull over, and the driver asks them if they’re Americans. Strange, but they answer in the affirmative. Turns out, it’s the guy who sold them the car in the first place. Right there on the highway, in Middle of Nowhere, Australia, Marcello got a crash course on the nuance of his new whip from the guy who put it together. “Small world” wouldn’t do the encounter justice.

While the network has proven itself to be as valuable as they come, especially considering the life-and-death scenarios overlanding can put you in, for Marcello, this sport is a great way to grab some serious alone time. Time for introspection, time to learn about yourself. Marcello is one of three, he’s got two brothers, one older, one younger. He says as a kid, when they were driving their mom nuts, she’d separate them. Those moments of isolation proved valuable for Marcello and his budding creativity.

“I liked the alone time with myself,” he says. "Now, let me just be in a car by myself, doing my own thing. I've always liked that weird enjoyment of that, and also just not knowing. Knowing you’ve got to get to a place from here to here, and not knowing how I'm going to get there.”

Marcello’s upcoming trips will take him to Baja, California and Canada’s Gaspe Peninsula north of Quebec, a trip he’s made before. “I'm only planning this because I didn't complete it, it's on my bucket list,” he says. “Other ones, you're just like, Eh, let's go to this country and run it."

Chances are, if he’s not coming back with a car, he’s certainly coming back with a story.

Photos by Kevin Wells and Courtesy of Daniel Marcello

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