Have Passport, Will Travel

Well, it’s been 51 days since my last update. Wow. 51 days. I knew it had been a while but now that I put an actual number to it, well … wow.

Have I ever mentioned how fast time goes? Well, it goes REALLY fast. Seriously. With so much time passing (very quickly I might add) I’m sure those that were once following along with last year’s ride have long since stopped visiting this site. I have only myself to blame. That said, the updates resume today. Obviously. I’m still working on a longer plan for my next great crisis so the updates are unlikely to be daily but there will be updates. Whether anyone will notice I have no real way of knowing. C’est la vie. If nothing else at least I’ll have a journal for my own amusement.

When last I posted an update, I had arrived (rather anticlimactically) at my aunt and uncle’s place in Lakeland, Florida. While it officially completed my perimeter loop of North America – well, populated North America anyway – I didn’t really experience the grand finale that I had hoped for. As you may recall, the lack of a finale was essentially due to the cracked tooth I had been travelling with for the last few weeks of my journey. A cracked tooth that had me returning to Canada two days after arriving in Lakeland.

Cracked tooth notwithstanding, I didn’t really have a specific grand finale planned but the original hope was that I’d get to wrap up my 13,500 km ride with some hang gliding at Quest Air. From there the plan was to spend the holidays somewhere warm. Needless to say, the holidays were not spent somewhere warm. At all. Although, relatively speaking December in Toronto wasn’t as cold as I feared. Then again, it also wasn’t as warm as I would’ve liked.

Both the holidays and my tooth are now gone and in their absence is another urge to hit the road. Somewhere. And now that I have my brand new 10-year passport in my possession I’m once again free to move about the country … and continent … and world. The big, yet still unanswered question is “Where?”

Well, for starters I felt that not getting to do any gliding at the end of last year’s ride was more than a little disappointing. Since I didn’t end 2015 with any gliding I’ve decided to rectify that by gliding my way into 2016. Okay, sure. I’m a little late to glide into 2016. But as of yesterday I am back in Florida – reunited with my aunt and uncle. That reunion included a minor adventure at the Orlando airport as we somehow managed to miss each other once I arrived and 45 minutes was spent trying to find each other. On the upside, it was the first time I’d heard my name paged on an airport PA system.

Now that I’m here, it’s safe to say that my plan is a bit vague but what little plan there is will begin with a trip to Quest Air. Actually, the plan will begin with a bit of bike maintenance.

As you may or may not recall, my final day of riding was a bit rough as it pretty much saw my bike (as Gabriela commented in my last update) skidding into Lakeland “broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming … WOW! What a ride!”. Translation: when I dismounted my bike I had a flat tire, a broken spoke and a bike very much in need of a cleaning.

And that brings us to now. The flat tire has been repaired and the broken spoke has been removed. Unfortunately, I don’t have the proper sized spoke to finish the spoke repair but hopefully I can do that tomorrow. Or the next day. There isn’t a lot of urgency since rain is in the forecast for the next few days so I plan on waiting for it to pass before I hit the open road. At some point during those rainy days I’ll also give my bike a good cleaning and then we’ll be ready to roll again. And Quest Air is only 75 km away.