So, we’ve arrived. The cyclists left the motel relatively early, at about 8am, with no complaints or grumbles about the hour or what lay ahead for the day. They all knew that the 48 mile journey from Marathon to Key West would be the last time they would cycle on this trip. About an hour later, I set off along Route 1, counting down the mile markers as I gradually approached zero and stopping only to pick up a bottle of champagne from a liquor store along the way.

I hadn’t passed any of the cyclists along the route, so when I arrived at the Southernmost Point, I had expected to find the cyclists already there. As it happens, they were still some distance away, so I loaded my change into a parking meter, abandoned the monster truck and set off in search of a beachwear shop so that I could finally buy some replacement swimming shorts. Finally, I managed to buy some – from a pharmacy of all places.

The Southernmost Point is a brightly painted bollard indicating that the long queue of tourists waiting to be photographed next to it are at the most southern point of the USA and only 90 miles from Cuba. The fact that one can clearly see other points that are further south did not deter the tourists, nor did it deter us from making this symbolic place the end point of the cycle ride.

I waited by the bollard for the cyclists. Eventually, Andy and Alex arrived in their trip tee-shirts (kindly provided by Armstrong UK), shortly followed by Neil and Leo. Leo’s leg was alarmingly wrapped in bandages, but thankfully it was just a spot of sunburn and not a final day cycling injury.

With everyone now dressed in the trip tee-shirts, I popped open the bottle of bubbly and poured it into some disposable Holiday Inn plastic cups. This attracted some attention from the queue of tourists, so before long we had a rapt audience listening to our tales and taking photos of us beside the Southernmost Point.

When the champagne was drained and the plaudits were subsiding, we sought out a beach on which to spend the afternoon. Most of the ones marked on the map appeared to have been replaced by building sites (presumably to turn them into private beaches for the guests at the expensive seafront hotels), but eventually we found one further to the east. Compared to the wonderful beaches at Myrtle Beach and Daytona Beach, this one was frankly a bit disappointing. The sand smelt of rotting seaweed and the sea itself was murky and shallow. Still, we splashed about for a while before checking into our motel at the east end of the island.

In the evening, we arrived in the main town centre of Key West moments too late to see the famous sunset. We dined at a seafood buffet restaurant where nutcrackers were provided to crack open the crab legs. Neil tentatively attempted to overcome his seafood phobia with mixed results, but found happiness in the ice cream section of the buffet.

On Tuesday we spent a day on another beach which was closer to the town centre, but still not particularly nice as far as beaches go. Determined to see the sunset, we headed to a bar on the north side of the island where the cyclists (i.e. not the designated driver) drank effeminate-looking cocktails. According to the Lonely Planet guide, 40% of Key West is gay, though we’re not sure if this includes the naval base. Even the taxis on this island are pink.

Annoyingly, cloud obscured any view of the sunset, so we moved on to an alleyway claiming to be the smallest bar in Key West. It really was tiny; the drinkers were a combination of people like us who had been lured in off the street and people who had been in there all day. One of the regulars bizarrely warned us to “never get caught pissing on a skunk”, which is unarguably a sound piece of advice.

The following day, it was my turn to see what all the cyclists were making a fuss about. In order that we could leave the car at the free parking of our motel, I dropped the others in town, drove back to the motel and then cycled the three miles or so back in. I don’t know what the big deal was; cycling is easy!

Andy and Alex had signed up for a scuba dive outing, while Neil, Leo and I had paid about a third of the price for a snorkelling trip off the same boat. The scuba divers had spent the morning in the swimming pool and were given detailed instructions and a mountain of equipment on the boat, whereas the snorkelers (the three of us, plus a young Dutch boy and his mother) were simply given a mask, snorkel and flippers and told to jump off the back of the boat. This was fine by us, as it meant we were allowed to swim freely around the reefs for a couple of hours, while the scuba divers had to follow their instructors around.

Apart from a couple of panicky moments when we saw a red jellyfish bobbing towards us, the snorkelling was great. We saw huge shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming only inches away from us; it was just a pity that the overcast weather reduced visibility slightly.

In 1982 the federal government decided it was time to do something about all the drugs and illegal immigrants that were entering Florida via the Keys. They built a roadblock at Homestead and checked every vehicle leaving or entering the Keys, causing severe delays and inconvenience for the residents. In response, the PR-savvy mayor of Key West, Dennis Wardlow, issued a Declaration of Independence, announcing the secession of the Keys from the USA. The Conch Republic was formed with Wardlow as its new Prime Minister, and it immediately declared war on the US, surrendering one minute later. They then applied for $1 billion in aid from the USA which, unsurprisingly, they are still waiting for.

Of course, the Conch Republic was never intended to be anything more than a PR stunt to boost tourism to the Keys, although they did briefly repel a US military island invasion practice with water cannons. More than 20 years later, the Conch Republic and its pink shell symbol live on as a camp tourism trap. The best bit, though, is their motto: “We seceded where others failed”.

On Thursday morning we lay in and missed breakfast, so we went to the Waffle House that was connected to our motel. The waitress warned us as she took our drinks order that they were out of both waffles and orange juice; this made Leo irate. The service was crappy, the food was rough (the hash brown was essentially almost-raw grated potato) and the officially non-existent waffle batter was being splashed across the floor by the staff. In the end, however, it was OK because our waitress was so inattentive that she entirely failed to bill us for one of our meals; she got a $5 tip for this.

We had intended to ride the Conch Train (a guided tourist road train) around Key West, but it turned out to be $27 per person. Instead, we split into two groups: Neil and Leo went off to some pirate museum, while Alex, Andy and I visited Truman’s Little White House. The Little White House was President Truman’s retreat away from the formalities of Washington DC. Even in the face of press criticism, he spent 10% of his Presidency in Key West between 1945 and 1953. Apparently, he got more work done there than he did in Washington, perhaps because of the relaxed atmosphere and the loud shirt competition he forced upon his staff. The tour of the Little White House was given by a woman from London who had a bizarre habit of doing dreadful Churchill impressions occasionally.

Moving along the road, we visited Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home, where the writer had lived during the 1930s. Having never acquainted myself with “Papa’s” work, almost everything the entertaining tour guide told us was news. Interestingly, the house is a home to around 50 cats and, even more interestingly, half of them have six toes per paw. They are all descendents of a mouser that was given to Hemingway by some sailors.

Cultured to the brim, our next museum was the Key West branch of a chain that I’d been pleading to visit for weeks. Ripley’s Believe it or Not began as a series of newspaper cartoons in 1918, featuring weird and unbelievable facts; the museums of the same name feature exhibits and images to illustrate some of these facts. We bought our tickets with our tongues firmly in our cheeks, but left hours later, grinning. Almost to our disappointment, Ripley’s Believe it or Not is actually, genuinely quite good.

Yet again, we tried to watch Key West’s famous sunset, but unfortunately it was once again obscured by the only clouds in the sky. Nevertheless, it was pretty impressive and we watched it until the sky’s darkening was accelerated by storm clouds rolling over. We ate at a Jamaican restaurant where the food was distinctly average, but perhaps we should have considered that the owners of a restaurant called Jamaican Me Crazy may have actually thought of the name-pun before they thought about whether they could cook Jamaican cuisine.

On Friday morning we packed up to leave Key West, stopping only to buy Key Lime Pie (a local delicacy and absolutely delicious) and for Neil to buy Key Lime Wine (a less well-known local delicacy which is apparently “surprisingly nice”). On the way along the Keys we walked a trail in search of the endangered Key Deer; we saw a few through the undergrowth. Our journey was bizarre for two reasons: firstly, we were travelling north for the first time since we reached Toronto six weeks ago. Secondly, we were retracing steps that I had previously driven and the cyclists had already ridden. This was the beginning of the end of our adventure.

Hours later we arrived at the final motel of our trip, just south of Miami in Florida City. We couldn’t get settled for long, though, as we had an appointment in Miami. The previous evening I had checked the baseball listings to find that finally our visit to a city coincided with a game. In this case, it was the Florida Marlins at home to the San Francisco Giants.
After a little confusion as to where the stadium was, we paid our $16 (how cheap is that?) and took our seats in the empty stands at the start of the third innings of a total of nine. Baseball is a strange game; it is even slower than test cricket, but with those awkward quiet moments filled with cheerleaders, mascots and co-ordinated crowd sing-a-longs of unwieldy club songs to prevent any problems with the audience’s attention span.

As far as I could tell, baseball is essentially a complicated version of the British schoolgirl’s favourite, rounders, except a run is scored perhaps only two or three times in three hours. A frequent American criticism of football/soccer is that it is too low scoring; I think maybe they need to look again at baseball.

Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy the game and I’m sure it can have the same hypnotic appeal as test cricket, but even the atmosphere was a little disappointing. Considering the crowd has literally minutes between moments of excitement, they have done a pretty poor job of spending this time productively by coming up with amusing songs or chants. In fact, they have just one chant: “Let’s go Marlins”, which is shouted repeatedly until eventually three batters have been outed on each team nine times, then everyone goes home without caring all that much about the final score. The following evening the same players repeat the match, and then again the next night and the night after that.

This morning we awoke to the news that Hurricane Dean was unlikely to come close to Florida, but was predicted to strike Jamaica full-on. The newscasters seemed far more concerned about whether Jamaica would take the bite out of the storm before it hits Texas than they did about what would actually happen to Jamaica and its people. I also noticed that despite it being a big island right in the middle of the on-screen map, Cuba is never ever mentioned by weather forecasters or reporters. Dean might well be about to hit southern Cuba, but as far as the US networks are concerned, it doesn’t exist. It’s as though an enormous Communist elephant is sitting off the Florida coast, but nobody wants to admit it.

Andy, Alex and I set off into the Everglades (Neil had been bitten by insects all night, so decided that stepping into a mosquito’s den for the day was not a good idea). At the visitor centre in Flamingo (a town with no flamingos at the far western end of the Everglades road), we saw a rare sight: a saltwater crocodile swimming around the marina. Alligators are very common in the Everglades, but their skinnier, greener cousins are quite rare here, although it is the only place in the world where both live side by side.

Crocodiles and alligators are tough, primitive creatures. They have evolved little since dinosaurs existed more than 65 million years ago, making them just about the closest things to them alive today. It is an indicator of how perfectly evolved they are that they have barely changed in a period of time 250 times longer than humans have existed for.
After being harangued by mosquitoes on a few forested trails, we took to the boardwalks back at the eastern end of the Everglades. In the surrounding marshes we saw several alligators and I was alarmed to see that the source of a loud squawking was a pair of large vultures sitting on the branch above my head.

We returned to the motel to begin the solemn task of emptying the monster truck of six weeks of accumulated crap. After vacuuming and washing the car, we went for our final evening meal in the USA at a seafood and steak house down the road. I ordered surf and turf again, and this time it was perfect. I now do see why people make such a fuss about lobster. To round things off, we ordered five slices of Key Lime Pie.

So that’s about it. Tomorrow evening, we board flights IB6120 and IB3164 (for the benefit of our parents), arriving in Heathrow at 2.45pm on Monday. Six weeks is a long time and we’ve seen so much since stepping off that plane in Chicago back in early July. We’ve witnessed one of the planet’s greatest natural wonders in Niagara Falls, and one of mankind’s greatest ever achievements at the shuttle launch in Florida. Along the way, we witnessed a tragedy unfold as a steam pipe exploded in New York City, enjoyed the theme parks of Orlando and were treated as a novelty in the Deep South, simply for being English.

By the time we reach Miami Airport tomorrow, I’ll have driven my monster truck almost exactly 5000 miles. If you were to drive in a straight line from London, that sort of mileage would take you to Zimbabwe, Brazil or almost to North Korea.
It is a very long way, but it is nothing compared to the 1600 miles or so that the cyclists have pushed and pulled themselves through to get from Niagara to Key West. Every one of them has put themselves through a personal hell at one time or another in order to drag that bike up a hill or along a scorching hot road, so my first thank you is to them for allowing me to tag along on their adventure with minimal discomfort of my own.

Secondly, thank you to our kind sponsors, Armstrong UK, who provided us with free clothing for the trip. Also a thank you to my other college son (the one I didn’t run into in Orlando), Andrew Goodchild, who I believe built the http://www.unihouse.co.uk website, which has certainly made the financial side of the trip so much easier to handle. If you live in a student house, you really should give it a try.

Thanks to everyone who has opened their wallet and sponsored one of our five good causes: your money is going directly where it is needed. Through donations to my nominated charity, Wateraid, there are at least ten people in the developing world who now have access to a lasting supply of clean water. Those ten people would probably be dead without your generosity.

I’d also like to thank everyone who has followed our trip on this website and everyone who has offered us support over the last month and a half. The number of people visiting every day (close to 150) has been way beyond what any of us could have expected. People that we met once along our travels and even people we have never met have been logging on, so thank you for giving all of us an incentive to blog our experiences.

Finally, I’d like to thank America for having us. This country has been surprisingly… surprising. It is easy to feel that one already knows the country, having been bombarded by its culture back in the UK. In fact, it has provided the unexpected at almost every turn, which has made the blog more interesting if nothing else.

Thanks for reading my glorified holiday diary. I’m off to London to get a job and pay off this trip.

Rob

The story so far in Alex’s words…So after being sat on a bike for 84.5 hours we have finally made it to Key West and I decided it was time that I wrote something for the website. Arriving was very surreal – we stopped 5 miles outside of the town to change from our rather sweaty lycra into our very stylish Team America T-Shirts so everyone knew what we had done and for a bit of self promotion. The final few miles were slightly hairy as the roads were a little busier, the hard shoulder had disappeared and Andy was trying to film us reaching the finishing post. The plan was to head to Mile 0 on Route 1 before turning left to go to the Southernmost Point of Continental America; we didn’t find Mile 0 as it was further north than we thought and we ended up in a housing estate feeling a little confused so we headed for the sea and found Rob perched on a flowerbed waiting for us by the large red and yellow bollard and queue of tourists that marks the Southernmost point.

For the first time in our 23 days on the bikes Neil and Leo had left without a mobile phone, this was not going to be a problem as we were going to meet them for breakfast just before the 7 mile bridge however they never turned up because they got puncture and decided to push on to get breakfast further down the road. This meant we couldn’t contact them to find out how far from Key West they were so we waited for them to show up hoping they had not broken down or been mowed down! Fortunately they showed up 45 minutes later and we joined the queue to get our picture taken by the bollard whilst Rob nipped back to the car to collect T-shirts for Neil and Leo. He reappeared with their T-shirts and our cooler which contained a bottle of champagne on ice. What a legend! We toasted our success and soon had a crowd taking our picture and quizzing us on our trip. I felt a little bit like a minor celebrity as everyone wanted to know what we had done and what it was like. Very weird considering it had started as a random pipe dream in the bar one night never really believing that it would actually happen. Overall it was just a feeling of massive relief and joy that we had reached our destination and completed the trip.

The trip itself has been fantastic; much better than I thought it would be. The cycling has been incredibly tough – the mountains in the north were long and steep and the days in the south were like cycling through an oven. But we have got to see some beautiful parts of the country and meet some fantastic people. We have had our scary moments as well – dodging trucks on our way into New York, avoiding dogs in the south and trying to distinguish the live snakes from the assorted debris that litters the side of the roads.

I now must say a few thank yous; firstly to Rob who has been amazing throughout the trip. He has done most of organising and booking motel and has not complained once when he has had to go out of his way to pick one of us up or drop something off for the cyclist. Without him we would not have made it and he has put up with the smell of 4 peoples very sweaty kit that has not been washed as often as it should without complaint.

Secondly to all of the people we have met along the way that have been so friendly and supportive. We have been given a lot of free gifts that have helped us along the way; from the person who pulled into the side of the road to offer us some ice cold bottles of water to the lady who gave us a towel after we had been caught in a thunderstorm. All have been massively appreciated and most of them will not know about this website or the journey we have undertaken. I will also take this opportunity to thank all the people who have sponsored us, I know it has meant a lot to Andy, Neil and Leo when they have been on the bikes and helped them to continue cycling towards the finish line.

Finally I must say thanks to the other riders especially Andy who has helped me keep going through some of the tougher parts of the trip. This support has been crucial to keep me going through the tougher days even when he sets off at 23 mph in 100°F claiming it to be gentle pace.

I’m now looking forward to putting my feet up in Key West and not getting on the bike for a few days before heading home. It’s going to be a bit of a culture shock when we get back to the UK but am looking forward to getting a curry.

Alex

On Saturday morning the cyclists and I joined US Route 1, the final road of the trip. Route 1 runs from Key West right the way up to the Canadian border in Maine over 2,300 miles away, so this was not the first time we’d come across this particular highway. Before long, we had crossed the small channel between mainland USA and the first of the Florida Keys: Key Largo.

I arrived a few hours before the cyclists, so headed to a water-side park/marina to write postcards in the sun. When the cyclists joined me, we all headed to a local laundromat and properly washed our clothes (including the disgusting-smelling cycling lycra) for the first time since Atlantic City THREE WEEKS EARLIER.

Afterwards, we decided to figure out what Key Largo had on offer. From the highway, it looked disappointingly like the usual identikit strip of motels, restaurants and stores, so we turned off down a side-road in search of the sea. Immediately, we found ourselves among large swimming-pooled houses, private beaches and gated communities. Key Largo is not a place to go on holiday unless you are wealthy enough to either own or hire a beach.

We stopped briefly to look at a bird sanctuary by the sea, then headed to a Cuban restaurant opposite the motel. The customers were entertained while eating by Cuban musicians singing such cultural classics as Pretty Woman and Hot, Hot, Hot. I ordered my favourite Wetherspoon’s cuisine: surf and turf, but with the classy (and presumably more traditional) touch of replacing the scampi with lobster. My first impressions of lobster are that it is nice enough, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

The restaurant’s music (despite the choice of songs) was enough to give me a sudden urge to go to Cuba. After all, once we reach Key West we’ll only be 90 miles away – significantly closer to Cuba than to Miami – yet there are no ferries or even planes that would take us there. In fact, it is effectively illegal for a US citizen to even visit their little Communist neighbours thanks to the various embargos that have been imposed on Castro’s Cuba since the 1960s. Quite why the world’s only superpower is still afraid of a harmless island in the Caribbean nearly 20 years after the Cold War is beyond me.

Coincidentally, we woke this morning to find a film on the TV called Thirteen Days, which depicts JFK’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. I had to check out of the motel before I could see its conclusion, but I assume it ends well because I was able to be born a couple of decades later.

The drive from Key Largo to Marathon was more pleasant than the previous day’s, and for the first time I was able to see the sea on both sides of the road. To my left was the Atlantic Ocean and to my right the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the proximity of two different bodies of water, Marathon is surprisingly sparse when it comes to swimwear shops where I might have been able to buy another set of replacement swimming shorts. As it’s a Sunday, the ones that did exist were closed or only catered for women, so I tried a K-Mart (which Bill Bryson’s Lost Continent had warned me about; it sounded like a large Kwik-Save).

K-Mart was as crappy a supermarket chain as it had been when the Lost Continent was written 20 years ago. When I finally found the swimming shorts on a randomly placed rack in the middle of the clothing department, I discovered that the only sizes they had left were XL and XL+3. I was so fed up of searching that I picked up the first minimally tasteful shorts, checked they had a draw string and took them to the counter.

Five minutes later, after struggling to try the shorts on behind the blacked-out rear windows of the monster truck, I returned them to K-Mart. The drawstring appeared to be for show and served virtually no useful purpose, though it wasn’t a wasted trip as I made a $2 profit from being refunded a tax that I hadn’t paid on the original purchase.

By this time, the cyclists had also arrived in Marathon, so we ate lunch and decided to come up with as many hilarious place names featuring the word ‘Key’ as possible. There are literally dozens of possibilities, and even hours later we were still coming up with new ones. My personal favourites were Key Pyupee and Hokeyko Key.

Tomorrow we reach Key West and the cyclists can finally hang up their clip-on shoes. It’s been a long journey down from Canada over the last five and half weeks. It’s difficult to imagine, but it’s actually four weeks since we arrived in New York City and three since Washington. Since picking up the car in Chicago, I have driven over 4,500 miles and the cyclists have pedalled further than I can comprehend, through searing heat and pouring rain, over the Appalachian mountains and across the flatlands of Florida. It’s been the trip of a lifetime for every one of us (not forgetting the contributions of the support car’s support passenger, Ed, who kept us insane through those early weeks), and we’ve got about a week left here in the Keys and the Everglades to relax once the hard work for the cyclists is over.

I’ll blog more in a few days time, but in the meantime I’m going to go all Bob Geldof on you. We haven’t cycled/written thousands of miles/words just for our own wellbeing. If you haven’t already sponsored one of our supported charities, please consider donating whatever you can afford to whichever charity you fancy by clicking here.

On Tuesday, after discovering that I’d managed to leave my swimming shorts in the previous motel, we set off to the Typhoon Lagoon water park in Orlando. It is a part of the Disney World complex, though the inside was disappointingly/agreeably (depending on your point of view) empty in terms of Micky Mouse, Goofy et al.

As the name suggests, the park surrounds a large artificial sea, complete with a wave machine to generate an enormous swell every 90 seconds or so. Around the lagoon is a circular river full of inflatable rings, which is quite possibly the most relaxing way to cool down in Florida; the never ending loop of water flows at a gentle pace and without a bit of self-discipline it would be quite possible to spend all day floating on it.

Dotted about the park were a number of slides: some quick, some twisty, some for inflatable rafts and some for groups. They were all fun enough, but an interesting twist to the park was a cold sea-water pool full of fish, stingrays and sharks. After kitting up with a snorkel and mask, we were allowed to swim the short distance across the pool and look at the sealife beneath us.

In the late afternoon, thunder started to rumble and immediately everybody was ordered out of the water. While sitting waiting for the all-clear, Andy returned from a wander accompanied by a few familiar faces. Here in Orlando, more than 4000 miles from Durham, was my college son (don’t be alarmed, a college parent is a mentor assigned to new students at some British collegiate universities), Matt Johnston, and his two friends from Van Mildert College, David Lomax and Andrew Tattersfield. After exchanging the traditional “oh, what a small world” comments (these coincidences seem to happen surprisingly frequently to me), we laughed for a bit and went our separate ways.

The storm never actually hit the park, so once the thunder had ceased the water was re-opened. By this point, most people had given up and gone home, leaving the slides and other attractions delightfully queueless. We squeezed in as many rides as possible before closing time, then headed home via Downtown Disney.

Downtown Disney is basically a fake town with shops, bars and restaurants. After Neil and Leo bought some horrific Dolly Parton CDs from a Virgin Megastore, we ate at a restaurant and went back to the motel for the night.

The following day was the scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour from Cape Canaveral, so we were planning our activities around that. Rather than going to any particular attraction for a half day, we had a lie-in and drove to International Drive for lunch. I ate a steak with all-you-can-eat shrimp (breaded, so it was essentially scampi); I don’t know whether anyone has ever requested their plate to be refilled with shrimp because I was initially served with at least three or four times more than it was possible for me to eat alongside a steak, and I didn’t even touch my fries.

To highlight the fact that we were definitely not the only Englishmen to ever visit this town, the restaurant was next door to a British themed pub. Sadly, we didn’t go inside, but it fulfilled all of the available exterior requirements courtesy of the red phone box, Union Jack and the fact it was called the George & Dragon. We drove to a nearby flea market which was frankly crap; it sold only fake sunglasses and tacky gifts, although Leo did get a free keyring by redeeming a voucher he’d cut out of a brochure.

We drove through the baking heat back towards the Space Coast and the town of Titusville which overlooks the Kennedy Space Center launch pads. After arriving we found a spare stretch of roadside on which to leave the monster truck and staked out a viewing spot by the water with our towels. Three hours later, Endeavour blasted off from the horizon into the perfectly clear blue sky. Our view of the scene was, of course, nowhere near as spectacular as the close-up TV pictures show, but to see a piece of metal containing humans literally explode off the ground and soar towards the edge of the sky was a sight to behold. Within minutes, the shuttle would be travelling at 15,000 miles per hour, a speed that would have allowed the cyclists to complete their entire journey of the last five weeks in around 6 minutes. Such power is noisy, and perhaps thirty seconds after blast-off we were hit by the sound waves from the launch site. Sadly, the wind direction reduced the impact of the sound, but the low rumble coming from such a distance away was still dramatic.

At the point when the solid rocket boosters detached from the shuttle over the ocean, it became invisible to the naked eye and continued on its journey towards the International Space Station. At almost exactly the same moment, thousands of people jumped in their cars and decided to sit in a miles-long car park for hours. We decided to sit for an hour and a half by the water until the traffic queue at least began to move, then joined it ourselves. Still, it took over three hours to make the 50 mile journey back to Orlando.

Over the following couple of days, the cyclists made their way steadily towards the south of Florida, via Lake Okeechobee (memorable only because of its amusing name). Friday night was spent in the southern suburbs of Miami where we ate out at an Argentinean steak house that specialised in Italian cuisine. The proprietor was a friendly Argentinean man who insisted on talking to us about David Beckham’s LA Galaxy debut upon learning that we are English (perhaps surprisingly, he was the first person to mention Beckham since a Starbuck’s employee in New York state).

That evening I also realised that I’d managed to lose my replacement pair of swimming shorts that I’d bought at Typhoon Lagoon. Quite how I managed to miss a big pair of pinky-orange shorts with a garish design while clearing the motel room, I’m not sure.

The journey so far by Neil Crimes

I’m now sat in a super 8 motel, in a small town called Lumberton in North Carolina (Since initially writing this we have now reached Miami, Florida, but that’s a different story which I haven’t got round to yet!), after spending 3 weeks in the USA cycling over 800 miles! I thought I would update you all with the journey so far from my point of view, how it’s been so far from the point of view of the most unfit member of Team America!

Day One: After some initial bike problems we finally set off from Niagara Falls, Canada and it quickly became obvious that Leo and I would not be able to keep up with the pace of Andy and Alex, who were already a good mile ahead of us at the bottom of the first hill! So after a few miles struggling to keep up, we split up into our two groups, going at our own, still exhausting, pace! We quickly encountered problem one though: our maps. Me and Leo were using road maps of America to navigate from place to place, the problem with them was that they didn’t show any minor roads at all… so after an exhaustive 80 miles cycling we were stranded 10 miles away from the motel, in a different town, with no idea how to get home! This was where our support vehicle quickly came into play: we rang Rob and he was at our side in a few minutes to pick us up.

Day Two: Feeling great from our good cycle the day before, and amazed that we were still alive we set off on the 90+mile journey down to Itacha. We quickly realised that the American dream of straight flat roads was very far from the truth however, and after the most exhausting day we finally made it into Ithaca, over many, many hills and through many backward little towns. Once in Ithaca problem two hit us: Leo’s phone. In a word, rubbish. It doesn’t get signal anywhere and so made contacting Rob very difficult, not having a clue where we were; we wondered around the town for a bit and finally discovered the art of using an American pay phone. Home for 9pm…dead.

Day Three: thankfully we had to add an extra day into the itinerary, and we were also very lucky with terrain: gorgeous valleys to cycle through that made the journey very enjoyable indeed. It was on these days that Leo and I discovered the joys of great American cuisine, in the many amazing diners we frequented. We learnt the lingo and started to develop some muscle!

Problem number 3 surfaced today as well, something which would plague the rest of the trip: my bike. My gears gave in today and whenever I wanted to change the front gears I had to get off and change them manually: not the most enjoyable thing to be doing over the Appalachian mountains. We got it fixed however, and hoped for the best.

Day 4: WARNING: never plan a route that takes you through any town which has ‘summit’ in its title. Clarks Summit, NY in particular. I hope I never have to go there again, or if I do, I hope it is in a car. I was glad to have gears today at least. It is very disheartening to spend 5 hour cycling up hill only to then descend into a valley down a massive hill in the last 5 minutes.

Day 5: Nearly there, only two more days to go and then we would be in New York. At this point, I was a ghost, the walking dead, I was so tired and exhausted. Not only were we doing stupid distances each day, we were doing it day after day and over hills. They were the kind of journeys that you would be proud of if you did them once at home, we were doing them every day.
2 miles into the cycle however, problem 3 resurfaced, my bike, in spectacular fashion this time however: my derailleur came off, snapping the hanger and smashing into my rear spokes. Luckily I was going up hill so I wasn’t badly injured, if it happened 5 miles earlier at the end of the previous day, coming down a massive hill at 40 mph, I most certainly would have been in hospital.
I didn’t know what happened at first, but after looking at it, it became obvious that I would not be cycling anywhere until I could get my bike into a shop that specialises in my model and would be able to replace several parts. It was Sunday, and we were in a small part of New York State, we sat in a motel car park and tried to find a cycle shop… all closed except for those in New York City. Begrudgingly we left for our next destination planning to look further once there. To our surprise however we found a Trek bike specialist in the tiny town we were staying that night! It was closed on Sunday of course, but the next day we were able to take my bike in. My hopes that it would be ready for the afternoon and I could catch them up were soon slashed though, it was a bigger job then I had realised and he had to fashion a new hanger from a newer model for me, a job that took him a few hours. Come the afternoon, and a few trips around mineral museums and the like however, my bike was finally fixed and we rushed to New York to catch up the others, who had just arrived.

The few days in New York were fantastic, what an amazing city! We managed to see two shows, see a few museums and art galleries, wander around, and see the statue of liberty and go up the Empire State Building at night. This was a truely spectacular sight, even more so that I got to share it with Leo.

The next leg of our cycle started with a trip down to Atlantic City.. my first time on the bike in over a week. I was very excited. It looked like we had a fantastic day’s cycle through the forests as well, until my bike broke of course! It was only a simple problem this time though, the bolt securing my seat into place had snapped (metal fatigue like the previous failure I imagine), so we had to ring Rob and get him to pick us up so we could find a shop as quick as possible, not the easiest of tasks in the middle of a forest in New Jersey. We found one though and were back on the road in a few hours. We had a good day’s cycle up until the point our useless maps meant that we ended up in the wrong city on the Interstate, a very scary place to be on a pair of bikes! Rob, as always, came to rescue once again though and we were whisked to safety!

The next day was the loooong day, Atlantic City to Washington, over 3 states and with the added task of catching a ferry in the middle! All Leo and I asked for was that for one day we would not have any problems with our bikes. And guess what?! 5 punctures, a split tire, a broken valve extension and dodgy SPDs…. as expected really. We spent more than 3 hours trying to repair puntures and having to wait for Rob to get a new tire, this was certainly not the thing we wanted on the longest, and hottest days so far. We had to race to catch the ferry in time, we were the last on!

We had a really good cycle though, it was just a shame that we were so far behind because of our problems. We were still cycling at dusk when Rob had to come and collect us, about 15 miles from our destination. We saw some of the most amazing sights that will stay with us for the rest of my life on this day though. Dolphins on the ferry, deer running by the side of the road, and the most amazing sunset peaking through the trees in Delaware. We also had some of the worst food that will stay with us for ever, fried chicken from a very dirty shop in a petrol station… me and Leo are still recovering from the after affects!
Washington.. a few, very needed, days off again. Odd City, the buildings and monuments seemed to have to been placed all around this big green, and none of it really made very must sense to me, and all looked a bit fake, rather like someone had invented the Capital on Sim City or Theme Capital Tycoon.

The next couple of day’s cycling have taken us to where we are today, on the coast in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I have found these few days cycling very difficult and have wanted to stop on many, many occasions. The surroundings have not been as inspiring, straight roads that go on forever, beside the interstate that zap the soul out of you. It hasn’t been the physical side of things that has been getting to me the most, but the mental, I think. I find that I really don’t enjoy cycling when I am on a busy road, or cycling by an Interstate, it really gets me down and I get tired, hot, and worked up a lot quicker. On the worst day I had to stop for a few hours beside the road and have a nap because the heat had got to me so much! The last few days have been good though because we have made sure that we have got up as early as possible to avoid the heat and have just cycled as fast and hard as possible to try and get everything done in the morning. The weather has been really good as well, a lot of cloud in the morning to keep the weather down, and then getting sunny in the afternoon when we arrive. I’m not sure how we are going to cope, or how we are going to plan our day in the next couple of days when the distances are longer and the weather may not be as forgiving!

Neil

Orlando is just crammed full of theme parks and other entertaining days out; it would take literally weeks to visit even just the highlights of what is on offer, so our three days was always going to be difficult to plan. We wanted to fit in a theme park and a water park on Monday and Tuesday, before finding something to do on the Wednesday morning before the scheduled launch of space shuttle Endeavour.

In the end we tossed a coin to decide between Universal Studios and Disney World’s Magical Kingdom (the main theme park in Disney’s complex of attractions). Universal won, so we rose early on Monday to get there before the queues. The attraction is split into two separate parks: the Islands of Adventure, which is like a small Alton Towers, and the main Universal Studios attraction, which contains mostly shows and IMAX films.

We bought tickets to allow entry into both parks and headed straight for the roller coasters of Islands of Adventure at 8.30am in order to beat the queues. We were able to walk right onto the Incredible Hulk, a hair-raising course of twisted green metal. I’ve not been on a decent roller-coaster in years, due to an irrational dislike that I developed during my teens, and Neil has never been on one, so we approached the Hulk nervously. As it happens, I loved it, though it would take a couple more roller-coasters before Neil grew to enjoy them.

The highlight of my morning was the Spiderman ride (although it was responsible for forcing the Spiderpig song from The Simpsons Movie to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day). It was a cross between a conventional roller-coaster and a 3D simulator. The carriage we were in actually moved through the streets as Spiderman and his foes swung right up to our 3D glasses, but then at times we apparently moved on the spot while surrounded by screens. This led to a disconcerting suspension of reality for us, as at times we had no idea whether we were really falling off the top of a building and being caught by a spider’s web or whether we were simply rocking backwards in our seats to make it feel like we were falling. This blurring of reality and fiction made for a superb ride.

Next, we mistakenly queued for half an hour for what turned out to be a children’s ride (which nonetheless caused Neil to scream with terror), before riding a couple of log flumes and an under-hanging double roller-coaster (two trains on separate tracks that pass hair-raisingly close to one another at ridiculous speeds).

In the afternoon we entered the main Universal Studios site and watched a couple of IMAX 3D films. The first, based on Terminator, uniquely combined live action characters on a stage in front of us with Arnie and co on the silver screen behind them. At times, the actors (lip-synching in time with the Governator’s speech) actually walked into the screen and appeared to become the on-screen actors. I thought that was pretty cool, but the others weren’t so impressed. The second was a showing of Shrek 4D, which is the same as Shrek 3D (available on DVD with glasses) but in moving seats and with water and air being sprayed at appropriate moments.

We had hoped to ride the only roller-coaster in the main park, The Mummy, but as we approached the front of the queue technical problems closed it for what would turn out to be the remainder of the day. Instead we tried their latest ride: the Men in Black simulator. This is much like the ghost train at Alton Towers in that riders are given laser guns and asked to shoot at aliens in the streets. Andy got the highest score in our car.

Before the day was out we experienced some of Universal’s more senior rides, including the famous Jaws riverboat experience, the ET ride and simulators of both tornados and earthquakes. The day ended by the lake in the centre of the park for an epic showcase of Universal films. Giant balloons on the surface of the lake were internally projected with movie clips, and accompanied by classic soundtracks such as Jurassic Park and Back to the Future. Finally, the show was rounded off with a stunning firework display, before thousands of people simultaneously headed for the car parks.