Few rides have been as direct and as straightforward as today’s, which I had down as 50 miles of weaving around the highway but which turned into something much simpler once I discovered that there was an excellent bike lane the whole way (someone should tell Google Maps). Oh, I did get a pun%&^*£, again. My rear tyre is so shredded from the repeated abuses of North & South Carolina’s hard shoulder (7 times!) that it really is on its last legs, even with my superglue repairs – I’m hoping to nurse it to the finish line, then I’ll say sayonara and have a slightly lighter bike box for the flight home.

• Today’s Distance (miles): 39 (11 miles quicker than planned!)
• Time in saddle: 3h 13
• Max/min temp (°c): 28°/21°
• Climbing (feet) : ?
• Calories used: 1,892
• Today’s 2nd Breakfast: Toasted avo/egg/tomato sesame bagel, orange juice and coffee, at Einstein Bros Bagels, Melbourne
• ‘Cafe’ time: 0h 20 (another bike repair stop, daylight this time)

Oh wait a minute – I’ve just been looking back at my photos and realised that something funny did happen on this morning, something I’d completely forgotten about. This blog, I’ve found on many occasions, is a fantastic way of keeping a record of events that otherwise might be lost forever. Cycling in the dark on the almost-deserted highway I was binge-listening to the Father Brown Stories with Andrew Sachs as Father Brown. At one point he was being given a lift in a new-fangled motor car, and the driver kept honking his car horn. ‘I do like that sound’, I was thinking to myself, when it was suddenly joined by an ear-splitting train horn. I stopped to turn the volume down, but the horn sounded again, even louder. At that moment not one but two freight trains thundered past immediately on my right, going in opposite directions.

It must be amazing around here when there is an actual rocket launch. It’s so incredibly flat and spacious everywhere, you must be able to see the fiery rocket trail from every corner of the state. As I passed the official NASA airport and the signs over to Cape Canaveral I thought about the many astronauts who must have used this stretch of road over the last 60+ years, knowing that they’d soon be sitting on top of a massive fuel tank waiting for someone to set fire to it. FOTB Jane Lodge got in touch with this story about trying to see an actual rocket launch, from precisely where I was last night:

‘During our stay, we also spent the night at Titusville (along with thousands of others), sleeping in the car to hopefully see Artemis 1 launch first thing in the morning – we found the perfect position with a perfect view across the river of the rocket ready to go…. but unfortunately the launch was scrubbed at the last hour. It finally took off 3 months later…..’

I suppose an awful lot of people are affected when there’s a cancellation like that, from holidaying Brits to the astronauts holding the ignition keys. I asked the Goodwill Ambassador what it was like, being a real astronaut, as I dropped my room key off at the empty motel lobby this morning, but he was still asleep. That crazy suit means he has to sleep standing up, poor chap. I knocked on his helmet and tried lifting the visor, but no response.

UPDATE: Showing comments working at their best, I now have a video clip from Jane showing the actual moment of launch of another rocket from the same place few days earlier – this is a Starlink rocket, smaller than Artemis but still looks incredible. Thanks Jane! The casual paddling in the surf whilst millions of gallons of rocket fuel combust is surreal.

The last 4 miles were the only stretch without a bike lane so I rode along the sidewalk, bouncing up and down at each side road and business entranceway, dodging suspicious items and hoping my tyre repair was ok. I’d spotted last night that just before the motel was a nice-looking bagel cafe called Einstein Bros Bagels, so that was my 2nd breakfast stop for the day. They did a great egg, avocado and tomato toasted sesame bagel, and the coffee was amongst the nicest I’ve had on this trip, certainly in the filter coffee category. Dark roast, piping hot and aromatic. You have to also factor into that just how much I really wanted a coffee at that moment – this was ‘a lot’ today, after my nonstop ride plus annoying bike repair, so perhaps that skewed things a little.

I arrived at the Super 8 Motel Melbourne, which was surprisingly smart and comfortable…

…and found that they hadn’t yet cleared away the breakfast from this morning. Taking my chance, I asked if they’d mind me collecting tomorrow’s breakfast today, as I leave so early? The woman at the desk said that would be fine and to help myself, so I dumped my bike at my room then came back and hoovered up anything and everything that I could use in the next day or so. She even gave me a tray to carry it all! And yes, schools have gone back. She had just decorated a Christmas Tree(!) with notebooks, pencils, and other back-to-school paraphernalia. It had taken her ages to get each pencil balanced on its string. ‘For Halloween I do witches and skeletons and bats and cobwebs, then it’s Thanksgiving and Christmas, then at Eastertime I put bunnies and chocolate in the tree. Every month I have something different. In January it’s Martin Luther King’s birthday!’ This is a motel that takes a bit more care over things!

CHARITY MILESTONE REACHED!: A few minutes after the train horn alert I received a JustGiving alert, to tell me that we’d reached the fantastic milestone of £3,000! It’s just brilliant, it really is. The positive results from this amazing generosity will be wide-ranging and life-changing for those people that Humanity & Inclusion exist to help.

TIME-SHIFTING: I’ve just realised that ever since I began this heat-avoidance cycling, I’ve actually returned to Greenwich Mean Time. I’m leaving roughly 4 or 5 hours earlier than ‘normal’, and getting very sleepy at kids’ bedtime. So I don’t expect to suffer any jet lag at all once I’m home (but I bet I still do).

A CHANCE DISCOVERY: Going through my photos recently, I noticed that there were five that seemed identical, all black screen shots, so I clicked on one and checked the dates. Savannah.

All of the photos, I discovered, were taken automatically by my iPad when the thief tried repeatedly to unlock it, but failed. The photos then uploaded automatically to iCloud when I got it back. And Officer Johnson’s first name, by the way, I found out when I paid him back for the international phone call, was Samuel.

SOME 1970s CYCLING, AND A ‘MELBOURNE’ COINCIDENCE: I know that at least 50% of you think that I must be bonkers to do what I’m doing (Dad and Oriel, you might think that’s an understatement AND an underestimate?). But I want you to know that it hasn’t come completely out of nowhere; there is a bit of history involved. For example, it suddenly struck me this morning when I looked at my route that there was a weird coincidence about today’s ride, but I have to tell you a story first to get to it.

50 years ago I was given a new, red-leather saddlebag, with red leather straps to attach it to the saddle hooks. My prized red Raleigh road bike (14 gears, beautiful silver shifters on the downtube, ornate lugs joining the tubing together, I loved that bike) had a nice Brooks saddle (as does my bike here), and once I’d fixed the bag on the back I felt inspired, the way you do when you’re ten years old, to make a ‘proper’ bike-journey, just to have a ‘proper’ use for it.

I packed the saddlebag full of sandwiches, crisps and chocolate, filled my one-and-only bottle with water, and set off from our house in Islington, North London on an adventure. My mum was a bit bemused, but it was half-term, the weather was good, and after all it was the 1970s, when parents assumed kids would probably be ok (at least mine did). I’d researched the route really carefully using the road atlas from our family car, and written it all down. That was it, no map with me, just a page of hand-written turn directions, which I kept in my saddlebag (of course). I considered this to be very organised and ample information to get me safely to my destination. And where was I heading? To visit my Grannie (my mum’s mum), who lived in a village called Melbourn, near Cambridge, which was, like this Melbourne in Florida, about 50 miles away. Starting at dawn (hmmmm, that sounds familiar too) I headed up the Holloway Rd and just took it from there. Of course, in 1974 there wasn’t a single bike lane anywhere. Although it took a lot longer than today’s ride, with many more stops to get my breath back and work out where the hell I was, I got there safely – apart from getting lost at Whips Cross on the way out of London, I vividly remember – and with far less technological help than I have with me on my bike today. However, I did arrive with an unbelievably sore backside, being so unused to long rides at that time.

Just a year later I joined the millions of 1970s kids who fell under the spell of the new Raleigh ‘Chopper’. It was love at first sight, and my ‘old’ road bike suddenly looked so dated to me that I didn’t want it anymore. (Now, I could weep! What was I thinking?). It’s hard to convey today just how obsessed my generation was with this bicycle. That Christmas I became the proud owner of a bright yellow Chopper bike of my own, with an extra speedometer mounted on the ‘dashboard’ by the ‘gearstick’, that clicked every mile I rode. Out went bike-touring, and in came bike-cruising.