Missing

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Oh boy where do I begin?

I suppose I should finish yesterday's excitement first. Imagine visiting an A&E department on a Saturday night in one of the few towns in the Uk to still have one (so somewhere bigger than, say, Bristol). You would be in for at least a 4 hour wait with all the drunks, stabbing victims and blokes with hoovers on their todgers. Not so in the US of A. Fort Bragg has just 7000 people yet sports a chuffing great hospital with 24 hour ER facilities. The ratio between staff and patients when we arrived appeared to be infinite in that there were lots of staff and NO patients! Our poorly rider was immediately seen by a triage nurse and then wafted in for a further prodding. He produced a urine sample that looked suspiciously like Strawberry Cresta (frothy man) which was tested and they confirmed that he had a cute urinary tract infection. It didn't look that cute to me, certainly less cute than an Andrex puppy for example.

With some anti-biotics and pain killers he was packed off home and we put him to bed to wait and see if he would live through the night. He did, so i have put plans to sell his bike on hold but, a day later, he still looks pretty poorly!

Today was a long 80 miles down Highway 1 with plenty of hills thrown in but everyone rose to the occasion and we were all in by 3:45............or rather all but ONE of us was. One of our fastest riders, who had been seen 18 miles from the finish at 1:30, still hadn't arrived at 4pm. Bugger! We searched the road - 15 miles back and several miles beyond the motel - but no sign of him. Time to use the second emergency service. We called the sheriff who took all the details, issued a missing person alert and dispatched a deputy. At 6pm, and to some relief,he turned up ( the rider not the deputy!) having cycled 120 miles. His satnav had failed, he rode past the motel and kept going for 20 hilly miles.  Luckily, and this is not a joke, it had been to foggy to launch the search helicopter!!!!!!!!!

I'm not sure how much more of this my nerves can take but i already have the number for the fire brigade ready for tomorrow.

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