Fallen Short

After just over three years, and about 33,000km, I have…just about made it back to where I started.

I’ll post more info shortly, but I’ve made it to London OK, and after a long tedious discussion with an immigration official, I was allowed into the country. But we’ll be watching you…

I put the bike back together outside Terminal 5, looked at the two options for riding out, and chose the more complicated one. Interesting times though, hunting about trying to find the bike trail I wanted, that runs more or less along the Thames. I was passing through villages, thinking that things looked very familiar, perhaps I was here 3 years ago. No wait, it’s just a standard anonymous English village. A lot of them look the same, all the same shops, same style houses, etc.

But then I got onto the trail I wanted, and had a very nice time, tooling along, stopping in a pub for fish and chips, with a couple of ales. Nice part of town, leafy suburbs, huge parks, etc. But of course it still has London’s drug problem. While stopped waiting for a train to pass, I realised that the well to do looking woman in the eco-dork Prius next to me was not wasting the downtime. No, she had the lighter, foil and pipe out. At 2:00 in the afternoon, while driving around a good suburb. I made sure I was well out of the way when she drove off.

Closer to the center things were busy, and I kept losing the trail I was following. I knew my general direction, so could get back on, but it wasn’t the most enjoyable in traffic. Eventually I made it past the center, and to the east, closer to Greenwich. All that time, and I was just about there. But for some reason I didn’t want to do it today. So I made it to the Cutty Sark, very close the Royal Observatory. I’ll finish off the distance on Sunday, before starting my trip about the UK, heading out to Bristol and then up to Scotland via Wales.

To mark this occasion, of almost reaching my goal, I have taken a new image of my feet, by popular request. They weren’t very interesting when I was wearing shoes every day, this is after a day of walking about Buenos Aires in jandals.