The MacLeods epic overland journey
Update: 2025-11-18
Description
In 1962, Dunedin farmer Alan MacLeod said to his wife Joan and six kids, 'how about going for a drive'?' Little did they know the 'harebrained scheme' Alan had cooked up would see them travelling the world in a homemade house truck a year later. Alan's wanted to reconnect the family with their MacLeod ancestry on the Island of Skye in Scotland, and visit friends he had made fighting in the Italian campaign in World War II. With a few boat crossings, they did it all in their house truck 'Holdfast' built from a Ford tractor engine, a city bus cab and the chassis of an armoured scout car. The extraordinary story is told by Hannah MacLeod whose mother Marilyn was one of the six kids on board. Hannah interviewed her aunts and uncles, and trawled through diaries and old newspaper clippings to recreate the story in her recently published book Overland to the Island.
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