Now that James and I have devolved into cheesy detective speak for 20% of our conversations, started overdubbing Spanish soaps with similar McBurger and Diesel dialog, and have let D and McB permeate into this blog, it’s probably best to relate the origin of these most excellent adventure detectives.

It was late into the 2012 Mongol Rally and we were in Siberia in a place called Barnaul, Russia. We were all pulling ourselves back together after probably the most random night of the entire 26 country adventure. James, Peter and I had gone out on the town and hit up a multi-functional building with three floors (actually here’s a street view of the joint, easy to recognize by the tank out front). Street level around the side there was a cool place called Bar 13,000. The main floor was a theatre. The second floor was a bar. The third was a techno dance club. And there were rippers in the basement. So ya, pretty much everything you need for a lovely evening all in one building.

I won’t get into the specifics of the evening, but basically we started at bar 13,000 with 2 other rally teams, slammed back some Baltika 7s and moved to the third floor, found a bunch of other rally teams up there and cranked it up to 111 on the dance floor. We met a bunch of locals and were doing a plethora of shots. From there all of the members of our crew split ways and in the morning we were piecing things together: Peter went with some locals to a bottle service spot and pounded vodka until morning, he had barely slept. James and a group of Aussies somehow caught an exotic dancing troupe late in the evening and had gotten back to the hotel wondering where the hell everyone was. And I had been dragged off to the Siberian suburbs one hour out of town unknowingly (roofies maybe?) and had quite an adventure back which may or may not have included some mafia types (but that’s a story for another time).

Anyways, we wanted to get the hell out of Barnaul at this point and in the morning we were putting a simple checklist together. First we needed food. Anything to sop up the convoluted mess we’d thrown down our gullets during the evening. We figured this greasy food truck thing called McBurger would do the trick. We’d seen it while roaming around the night before. And we also couldn’t leave town without filling Admiral Nelson up with diesel.

During this conversation our still bottle-service-drunk companion split in a fit of laughter. “Oh yeaaah, McBurger and Diesel are on the case! Sounds like a cheesy detective sitcom. McBurger and Diesel splishssffff hahaha!”.
There you have it.

Later that same day, Peter had sobered up enough to take a killer pic of James and I looking extra tough (somehow) and he threw it on facebook with the description ‘McBurger and Diesel, in the Altay they ARE the law!”.
A legend is born!