Grumpy Old Men On Bikes

On Monday I had a meeting in Edinburgh so flew up.  At the time I briefly reflected on how splendid it was it be able to go so far so quickly.  Of course this was a pure illusion, induced by the minute size of Britain relative to the sodding great ball of on which it sits.  Presumably people marvelled at the horse and cart in its day, and it was probably a jolly fine way of getting about if the limit of your travel plans was the next village. When you need to go to Auckland the jet engine becomes about as much use as a chocolate teapot.  We need, at the absolute minimum, ballistic flights via space but preferably matter transporters.  Why the engineers aren't busy sorting this out rather than concentrating on plasma TV's bigger than the average house is a complete mystery. I am in Kuala Lumpur and a tad grumpy. At least the engines, pathetically inefficient as they are , have kept working and we are neither late nor dead.   I had forgotten about...

My delight at turning my back on the dregs of a British winter is tempered somewhat by the prospect of the looooong haul down to Auckland.  I shall, again, be flying Emirates, sadly not on one of their snazzy techno-planes but a good old-fashioned Boeing.  Apart from being steam-powered and lacking many of the gizmos that Airbus cram into their A380, the plane will also be worryingly deficient in another area......engines.  As far as I'm concerned you really cannot have too many engines.  Having once had the delight of landing with my head between my knees and smoke pouring from 50% of the engines (okay....one but it was still 50%) I am a big fan of engines (and, hilariously, engines have a BIG FAN).  Boeing, who clearly care nothing about my personal safety, have decided that a miserly TWO engines is sufficient to get me half way around the world. I fly at 13:30 today and, provided at least half the engines keep working, I arrive safely in New Zealand in the ...

Have you noticed how pants the weather is?  I certainly have, so I have decided to run away from it for a month.  As you may know, I am a bit of an expert at 'not cycling the length of New Zealand' so I thought I would induct some fellow cyclists into the club.  On Jan 29th I head back to New Pieland to run a Bike Adventures trip from Auckland to Te Anau ( i.e. missing out the monstrous hills of Northland that nearly killed me last year and the rather dull bit at the very bottom of Southland).   There will be 6 riders for the whole trip, joined by 2 more in Fox for the final week.   I have travelled elsewhere with all but 2 so we mostly know what we are in for.   I will have a love machine.....though obviously not THE Love Machine :-(.  This one is made by Toyota so will probably return excellent fuel economy but, despite this, I hope we can become good friends.  The relationship will obviously be platonic because I could never be...

‎In about an hour the Love Machine goes back to Avis; she has been a dear and faithful companion and I will miss her. In case I get an identical car next year I have hidden a worn sock so that I will be able to tell if it is her. Thanks to some rather leisurely cycling, resulting in them all missing a ferry by 10 minutes, they reached the border in the dark. This morning we all went back in LM to gloat at the dagos in daylight.   The 'best' place for dinner last night (best as in ONLY) was a Mexican seafood place an‎d actually very good.  In addition to good food they offer inexpensive drinks and all served by girls in tiny black dresses who were obviously recruited for their physical charms.  Nobody actually said 'If those puppies are for sale I'll have the one with the pink nose'....but I bet we all thought it. Having gained a few pounds on the trip I was thinking about the whole Merican obesity problem and it occurs to me that actually people here ...

‎Today I have established Bike Adventures' Global Command Centre on Long Beach.  Yesterday Neil met a large group doing a charity ride from San Francisco to LA. They told Neil about their support crew, with multiple support vehicles, spare bikes, mechanics on motorbikes ‎etc. Apparently Neil replied that all he had was a bloke drinking beer by the pool.  As you will see from the photo, the rowt runs on a cycle path through the sand so I am NOT sunbathing but manning a support station. AND my cup holders are empty. I am going off Neil! ‎‎ If you look more closely you will see the Queen Mary in the background; it is now a floating hotel and restaurant. Everyone is enjoying the run past LA with lots of beach riding and girls in bikinis, though first thing this morning we had a pretty nasty 10 urban miles through ‎the city sprawl. We will now stick to the coast until the Mexican border where the holiday ends (and the party begins :-))

The photo is of my office for the morning - set up on the beach just north of Malibu. It was taken at 10:30....temperature 85 degrees! Yesterday I set my chair up on the beach in Santa Barbara. As I gazed blankly out to sea a flock (collective nouns are tricky but I'm pretty sure it is a flock) of dolphins cruised past, leaping and diving just a few yards from the shore. ‎How on earth can this be a legal way to make a living?  A couple of bonus tracks: Who Let The Dogs Out? Yesterday I got the call I always dread.... 'Man down'. Some prat in an RV ‎parked at the side of the road had flung their door open and released a dog, straight in front of a rider. He landed pretty hard and has a few cuts and bruises but is still alive thanks to his helmet which took so much force that it split straight up the back.   The cops somehow arrived within seconds, quickly followed by a fire engine and their trained paramedic gave him a thorough once over. By the ti...

I have been wanting to write about this for a few days but couldn't think of a suitable song title then, in the bath this morning, I had an epiphany. Don't worry....I cleared it up. In one of our motels we had an even more bewildering selection of television channels than usual...several hundred at least. I naturally zapped through to explore them and established that they were all rubbish but......hang on a minute......the Adult Toy Channel. Sure enough it was QVC but with dildos. We only watched for a few minutes but haven't laughed so much in a long time. The two presenters were both attractive women, one claiming to be a doctor and the other your standard shopping channel bimbo. The doctor would introduce each new toy and explain the many benefits of its bumps, vibrations and gyrations while the bimbo looked on, occasionally nodding and saying things like 'wow', 'that sounds great' and 'I MUST try that'. Laugh? We nearly shat. We hav...

Another compilation John Wayne is Big Leggy A rather obscure tune this...if you wan't to look it up try the YouTube clip from Top of The Pops where the girl singer wears a see-thru top!!! Two of my riders have the first names John and Wayne so, naturally, I have put them together in a shared room.  It is a measure of how dull tour leading can be that I get a huge kick out of handing over the rooming list to the receptionist each night!  In a past life I used to travel with a guy called Mark Smith and always enjoyed saying I had rooms in the name of Smith & Wesson. 19 No, not the average age of a GI in Vietnam but the average mpg of a Love Machine over about 2000 miles. This is magnificently inefficient and will earn me the Congressional Medal of Honor. I Need A Dollar Today is Ford Mustang day as we are heading through Big Sur.  If I had a dollar for every Mustang I have seen I would have a enough money to buy one (though only if it cost $97)...

I'm quite pleased with this as a title instead of the usual 'Now That's What I Call....' to introduce a compilation album.  AND it ties in nicely with the photo of my fantastic new chair.  You will note that both cup holders are empty...it was only 10:30am after all! Whiskey In The Jar It occurred to me that people may have doubted that the key-loosing potion in Coos Bay was actually served in  jam jars so here is photographic evidence.  It is only as I write this that I have noticed those very same keys immediately behind my jar on the table.  Bugger. Money's Too Tight To Mention Presumably the fact the the US government has been shut down for 9 days has reached the UK?  It seems that the Republicans and Democrats have been unable to agree a spending plan that will include Obamacare and, since they haven't agreed, have no money to pay anyone.  As you might expect, everything seems to be ticking along quite nicely without the...

So what is it like not sharing a room with Knobby? Well, there is considerably less snoring, less faffing by orders of magnitude and you can go to the loo and not find the telly re-tuned to Merican Football when you come out. My room mate, Neil, is proving to be an excellent substitute. He is a jovial carpenter from Somerset who wears a permanent smile and says 'proper job' and 'gurt' instead of great. He is also a master 'bodger' and has introduced many 'improvements' to his bike using bits of stick and old plastic that he scavenges from the roadside. I may have over-tested our new friendship by suggesting that some of these look a bit crap. A measure of Neil's good humour is that at no point in the night of the lost keys did he hit me or throw things at me!! My new lover ....I mean roommate, is known to Knobby as he was on our Italy jaunt in May and I don't know if this will make things better or worse if he reads this! Today we ...