Most of us are quietly proud of a holiday road trip or a spirited run across a mountain pass. I would feel the same, but I recently stumbled upon a story that would make even the most rugged Land Rover Defender adventurers shake in their waterproof boots. The aptly named Avants Magazine lead us to one of the coolest same-model gatherings we’ve seen in recent years, and a journey they tackled in 2024 that would change their mindset on road trips forever, and the organiser behind it was none other than Blue Nelson.
Blue has driven through more than 130 countries and covered over a million miles, almost entirely in classic cars. He's the sort of person you hear about before you meet them, the kind whose exploits sound like mythology until you're actually standing next to him on the side of a desert road, watching him wave off a broken hood latch like a minor inconvenience. Blue's daily life involves hunting down and restoring rare cars for clients across the globe, and his personal collection reflects exactly the kind of person he is, eclectic, uncompromising and deeply knowledgeable. Alongside a late 1940s Plymouth business coupe and a wildly rare 1957 Rometsch Beeskow, a Volkswagen-based coachbuilt roadster, sits the car that has become his true calling card: the Mercedes-Benz W123 wagon.
Produced between 1975 and 1986, the W123 is revered for its bulletproof build quality, its robust drivetrain, and a six-digit odometer that Blue, more than anyone, genuinely needs. Having personally owned over 300 of them, he is, without question, the living encyclopaedia of these cars. He also happens to host a yearly Wagon Tour in their honour, which is precisely how a convoy of 26 W123 estates recently found themselves pointing towards Death Valley.
The destination was almost beside the point. Blue organised everything and told nobody the route. No directions at the driver's briefing, no map handed out at the first fuel stop. Follow the leader or get left behind, as he puts it. What unfolded was a weekend of spectacular surprises, each stop revealing something better than the last: a vast lunar landscape of 140-foot desert spires at the Trona Pinnacles, the quiet camaraderie of strangers becoming friends over shared obsessions with odometer readings and diesel versus petrol debates. All told, the 26 wagons in the convoy had collectively covered more than seven million miles. Many of those cars had crossed the half-million mark on their own.
"Think of this like a Thanksgiving dinner," Blue said at one point. "Who would you want at your table?" After a weekend crossing one of the earth's most inhospitable landscapes in 40-year-old German estates, surrounded by people who genuinely love what they're doing, it's a question that answers itself.
Find out more about this incredible journey here.
Photography by @cprdvs
