Cycling the Americas: Introduction

Ok, so I had better get this started. I'm in a hostel in Santa Monica, taking my first day off. I've been on the road for over a week and it's become pretty obvious that these things don't write themselves. For some reason I had imagined effortlessly rolling down the west coast, with all the time in the world available for journal writing and coffee sipping, but this hasn't been the case. For a start, it's been getting dark around 4:45, by 7:30 it's too cold to be out of your sleeping bag... and then there's all the cycling you've got to do.

This trip was originally conceived as a trip for two. It's actually the 'return leg' of tour I did in 2005-6 from London to Singapore, en-route to Australia for a working holiday. My arrival in Australia was delayed by 10 months after I picked up some work in Singapore. By then I felt I deserved some more time off so cycled from Melbourne back up to Darwin, so I didn't actually start my year working in Australia until mid 2007. That one year turned into four. For most of those four years plans for a return trip were never far from my mind.

The plan was simple. Wrap up my affairs in Australia, rendezvous with my girlfriend at the wedding of a friend in Bali, return to Singapore and fly together to the US, via a couple of weeks in the UK.