Sixteen drivers, 68 days, 20 countries. A convoy of Vietnamese adventurers just finished one of those trips that sounds made up until you look at a map: Hanoi to Paris, overland, in their own vehicles. The [full story over on MSN](https://www.msn.com/en-xl/lifestyle/other/driving-from-hanoi-to-paris-68-days-through-20-countries/ar-AA2dtFto?ocid=BingNewsVerp) lays out the whole journey, and it's worth a read.

What gets me about these long-haul convoy trips isn't the distance. It's the borders. Anyone who's done even one international overland crossing knows the drill: paperwork, waiting, more paperwork, a guard who wants to see a document you don't have, more waiting. Now stack twenty of those back to back, in places where a Vietnamese vehicle registration raises eyebrows and nobody speaks your language. The group spent plenty of hours waiting at borders along the way, and I'd bet every one of those hours felt longer than any stretch of driving. The road is always the easy part.

They crossed mountains too, which is its own kind of math. I don't know exactly which ranges they threaded, but I've driven enough loaded vehicles through high country to know what that does to a trip. Grades slow you down, weather changes on a dime, and every pass is a decision about whether you push on or make camp early. Multiply that across weeks of travel and the mountains stop being scenery and start being a daily negotiation.

But the thing is, these trips deliver the moments you can't buy. The crew met locals along the way, and if my own long trips are any guide, that's the part they'll still be talking about in ten years. You give up showers and sleep and any control over your schedule, and you get people instead. Every long trip I've ever taken has shaken out the same way: the gear fades from memory, the faces don't.

Sixty-eight days is also just the right length for a trip like this. Long enough that the convoy stopped being sixteen separate travelers and became one moving family, which is what happens when you break down together, eat together, and argue about routes at 11 p.m. in a parking lot. Short enough that everyone still had lives to come home to.

The finish in Paris is the photo op, sure. But I'd bet money the moments that actually stuck with this group happened somewhere unnamed, on some shoulder or in somebody's kitchen, the kind of places that never make the highlight reel.

Sixteen regular people with jobs and lives back home just drove from Hanoi to Paris in 68 days. They decided to go, and then they went.

When's the last time you drove somewhere that scared you a little? Not dangerous-scared. Unknown-scared. Might be worth putting on next year's calendar.