Eight years later, Baggarly's after-work hobby has ballooned into Drive Around the World—a local nonprofit organization that makes Land Rover expeditions all over the world.

Its latest project? A nine-month, 11-member journey through 34 countries in four Land Rovers: 31,000 miles altogether. This trip, called the "Longitude" expedition—in contrast to 1999's "Latitude" excursion—benefits Parkinson's disease research. Using sophisticated technology, the team will interact with classrooms in a specialized education program.

Longitude leaves in October and will travel from San Francisco to South America to Australia to Asia and to Eastern Europe, heading home by way of Alaska. The team will make stops at Land Rover dealerships, Royal Geographical Society field centers and Parkinson's research institutes.

But it's not all work and no play. The schedule includes a day at a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, where team members will get to pick coffee, and an excursion to go crayfishing.

At the Drive Around the World headquarters on University Avenue, Baggarly and a crew of about 40 volunteers are working hard around the clock to prepare for the adventure. Baggarly, executive director of the organization, has people working on accounting, web development, information technology and vehicle mechanics.

Drive Around the World also has a small advisory board that includes Assistant Director Jonathan Knowles, Los Gatos resident Steve Wozniak and experts in expeditions, high tech, Parkinson's disease and Land Rovers; it also has an impressive list of alliances with various corporations specializing in travel, transportation, education and technology.

It's a far cry from the organization's roots—in the driveway of Baggarly's University Avenue home.

Baggarly's first acquisition was in better shape than he'd previously thought and didn't need a whole lot of work. So he then bought "Alaska," so named because the previous owner, a scientist, had driven it on expeditions in the state.

Alaska, built in 1962, took two years to refurbish. Baggarly even worked on it when he was transferred to Canada for a time. Meanwhile, he did research on the Internet and ended up chatting with other Land Rover owners about "project vehicles."

Photograph by Chanda Baggarly While in Inner Mongolia in 1999, a dust storm subsided just long enough for the Latitude team in the Land Rover named 'Alaska' to take a picture of their fellow travelers in 'Hercules.'

In 1997, Baggarly and then-girlfriend Chanda joined a team to deliver $6,000 to a town in Belize. It took 60 days to drive the 8,000 miles through four countries, and, Baggarly says, they "learned how hard it is to do good." Baggarly also says he learned how essential it is to be thoroughly prepared and have professional support.

The first official Drive Around trip was Latitude, which took place in 1999 and was a three-month trek westward from Beijing to San Francisco.

Baggarly says he and Chanda first got the idea for Latitude when he read about two men in their 60s who drove a 1954 Packard around the world, and they realized they could do the same. "We thought, 'Hey, we're good at this. It's what we love to do,' " Baggarly says.

On the Drive Around the World website, Latitude is summed up as "Four Silicon Valley engineers, a mountain climber and a Peace Corps volunteer travel around the world in 78 days driving old 1960s Land Rover Dormobiles and answering email questions sent via satellite from California students."

One of the main attractions of this team of traveling Americans was a 1963 Amphibious Air Portable General Purpose Land Rover. The detachable pontoons and propellers, originally used for military purposes, allow the vehicle to float across bodies of water. Twenty-six of those Land Rovers were built; eight are remaining in the world today.

"Rather than restore it and put it in a museum, we use them to travel around the world," Baggarly says.

The maker of those pontoons was Zodiac, which is a sponsor of Longitude and has agreed to make a new set of pontoons for a Longitude vehicle.

The community benefit of Latitude was a pilot education program in which the team used the Los Angeles Unified School District fax-back system to leave 10-minute messages for classes and receive questions from students.

"We answered thousands of questions when we were on the road," Baggarly says.

Photograph by Jeff Okubo Day 17 of the 1999 Latitude expedition found Nick Baggarly and his team crossing the Himalayas in Tibet. To the right is Shishapangma, the 14th highest peak in the world.

One country where the group did not have the opportunity to absorb the culture was Pakistan. Like in all other countries, the team had notified the local U.S. embassy that they were coming into town and had worked out travel arrangements through the consulate.

"The day we arrived, our embassy was bombed," Chanda Baggarly says. The consulate had arranged for one policeman to escort the Americans, "but since the embassy was bombed, they doubled our security and rushed us through," she says.

Los Gatos resident Jeff Okubo, the videographer and photographer for the trip, says Latitude "was the trip of a lifetime."

"Traveling, for me ... it just makes me feel alive," Okubo says. "And the moment we got back last time, Nick was ready to go again."

So ready, in fact, that Baggarly has spent the last two years planning for Longitude, which he says was planned "with persistence in mind."

One of the first things that Baggarly did upon coming home was get in touch with Land Rover. "Nick contacted us just to tell us, 'Look what we've done,' " says Bill Baker, director of special projects at Land Rover North America. Usually Land Rover owners contact the company looking for funding, but that wasn't the case with Baggarly.

"This was different. He wasn't asking us for a thing. He just wanted us to look at his cars," Baker says, adding that he was intrigued by the idea and looked up the Drive Around the World website. "A lot of money has been spent on promoting vehicles that have no goodwill whatsoever. Obviously, this is an animal of a different kind."

"When Land Rover heard that we were going around the world, they thought we were nuts." When the company confirmed that the team actually had completed the trip around the world, "that's when they called us," Baggarly says. "This is our third expedition. It's not like it's our first expedition."

A Land Rover is the ideal vehicle for this kind of trip, Baker says, because it is officially sold in 120 countries. "You can drive an old Land Rover like Nick has and fit in anywhere," Baker says. "There's generally a friendly connotation" because people use it for relief purposes. "And if you can't get the parts, you can hammer it or weld it," Baker says.

According to Baggarly, Land Rover parts are available anywhere in the world, and the vehicle can use any kind of gas.

"This is not a vehicle that you see soccer moms driving around," adds Knowles, Baggarly's longtime friend, who became assistant director a little more than a year ago. At 80 horsepower, "these old Land Rovers won't go fast. But they'll go strong," Knowles says.

J. William Langston is also a member of the advisory board. Langston is a neurologist, an expert on Parkinson's disease and founder of the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale.

Baggarly's 35-year-old sister has Parkinson's—one reason that the center was chosen to benefit from Drive Around the World. Baggarly says all cash donations will go directly to the institute; at the same time, the team is looking for a Parkinson's researcher to join Longitude for part of the trip and do population studies.

"The biggest thing, in a way, was the Parkinson's cause," says Drive Around the World technology and process advisor Lonnie Chrisman of why he joined the advisory board. "I am very attracted to a cause like that."

Baggarly further enlisted the support of renowned expedition leader Iain Chapman, a Scotsman who serves as a consultant for Land Rover and previously directed the Camel Trophy, an annual international off-road adventure.

"I've been doing expeditions in four-wheel driving, vehicle-based expeditions, for 25 years," explains the U.K.-based Chapman.

Chapman first met Baggarly in England and talked about the plans for Longitude. "One of the things that hooped me with Nick was the professionalism," Chapman says, adding that he was also interested in the Parkinson's aspect of the trip. "I think it's marvelous when anyone gets off their butt," Chapman says. "And it's not just a selfish 'I'm going to drive around the world' thing. They're doing it properly, with a capital 'P.' "

As the expedition logistics advisor who communicates with the Los Gatos base remotely, Chapman says, "My involvement has been 99.9 percent used as a bit of a sounding board."

One advisor closer to home is David Homa, a Los Gatos High School social studies teacher. Homa was introduced to Baggarly by Steve Wozniak—"He thought our philosophies about education and travel just really clicked," Homa says.

Homa is in the process of developing a curriculum for Drive Around the World that can be used for students of a variety of ages. "My philosophy is, you don't have to be in the classroom to teach the kids," Homa says. "The thing we're trying to do is have the kids learn outside the book."

The curriculum would be multidisciplinary, related to geography, social studies and history.

"Generally students are taught that they have to learn, not that they can want to learn," Homa says. "We're trying to show students that this is the world and they can see something else out there and they can experience it for themselves."

Along with respected professionals, Drive Around the World also has the support of several organizations, including the Royal Geographical Society, a British society of explorers. Both Baggarly and Knowles are fellows of the society; Baggarly spoke last year at a society conference.

Photograph by Jeff Okubo One of the eight existing 1963 Amphibious Air Portable General Purpose Land Rovers is owned by Nick Baggarly, who brought the vehicle along on the Latitude expedition in 1999. Here the car floats along in the Sichuan Province in China.

Chanda Baggarly, in charge of country research, has the formidable task of gathering "about eight pages of information" for each of the countries that Longitude will cross. She spends roughly 30 hours each week doing the research to collect information on visas, road conditions, altitudes, local food and customs and lodging, as well as notifying embassies and hospitals of their arrival.

And then there's the team itself. Baggarly has about half of the nine-person group that will be on board the entire trip. Homa, Okubo and Knowles will be with the expedition at least part of the time due to their job situations, but Baggarly is going through an intense screening process to choose the permanent members.

"You can't just say, 'OK, you're my pal, you can come.' Living together for nine months? You have to make sure you're compatible," Knowles says. "A real synergy starts to build when you get people of that kind of like-mindedness together."

"Each member needs to be able to offer something to the team that's beneficial to the team as a whole," Homa says. Drive Around the World aims to include a writer, a documentarian, an educator and a photographer, among others.

"The fact is, this is a group of real successful people," Knowles says. "Every single one of them embodies a sense of spirit and adventure."

In addition to the nine members, there are two rotating positions. That's the "Take me with you!" program, which allows guests to come for periods of two or three weeks. Five hundred "wedding-type invitations" will be sent to celebrities, travel writers, the media, Drive Around the World sponsors and Parkinson's representatives, asking them to compete for the 60 "Take me with you!" spots.

"We're trying to do a lot with this expedition. It's not just a trip," Baggarly says.

Besides logistics, the adventurers must prepare themselves emotionally.

"The homesick part really is the only challenge for me," Okubo says. While Okubo has much to do in terms of financial preparation—"There's a lot that you have to get in order when you're away from home for three months. There's even more to do when you're away for nine months," he says—he finds that "the toughest part is the mental preparation for this trip."

But Iain Chapman says the Drive Around the World team already has a different kind of mentality.

"You've got to be a bit of a nut to want to drive around the world anyway," Chapman says. "I personally get a kick out of doing unusual things, and most of Nick's team members are that kind of folk."

"I have driven around the world myself, and I know the hassle," Bill Baker says. Not only are these people willing to take on that hassle but they're putting their professional backgrounds to good use.

"I admire people who have made it in life, and now they're reinvesting their energies," Baker says. "They could be sitting on a beach somewhere."

For more information on Drive Around the World, visit www.drivearoundtheworld.com or call 408.354.DATW.