Running Away

Posted by on 27, Mar 2019 in 2019 - Orlando Northwards, Tilly the Tandem, USA

Running Away

Eisenhower was quoted as saying “No plan survives contact with the enemy” and our plan this March had been to not be in Europe for B-Day, but the enemy, being Mrs Mayhem herself seems to have buggered this up big time and may now delay it until we finish our cycle trip here. No need for that Mrs Mayhem, please don’t wait on our account! Still, the good thing about being 5 hours behind the UK is that by the time we get up she’s done half her daily allotment of damage and there only another few hours until she stops for the day to plan the next days disasters.

Anyway, enough about the UK’s slide into ignominious obscurity and on to what the darn heck are we doing stateside again after getting a tad fed up with Plolystyrene cups, God Bless America stickers and the poverty of the interior. Well, it’s warm, flat and in a different time zone from the UK and has little interest in the demise of the mother country, which works for us.

We’ve come back to Florida to warm up and get fit – our joints stopped aching the day after we landed (heaven) and the sun hasn’t stopped shining yet. We will head up the coast a bit and then across to the Gulf coast to see our cousins before hiring a car to skip the middle out and get back to the coast to cycle the outer banks to Washington DC. We then will try (assuming we don’t get injured like last year) to go on the C&O canal and Great allegheny Rail trail to Pittsburgh and on to Canada completing our south to North US cycle. Hopefully by then it will be safe to return to Europe without the latest Mrs Mayhem disaster being all that’s talked about and we can look forward to food shortages and long border crossings for all Brits who’ve taken back control….

So as Ben Elton used to say ” A little bit of Politics there” but now that’s out of the system I promise not to dwell on it anymore, where exactly are we?

This year we’ve flown into Orlando along with the Disney holidaymakers arriving on a very pleasant Norwegian Air flight that really entered into the spirt of Disney and laid on its own roller coaster on the final approach throwing us around like Thunder Mountain and keeping the cabin crewe busy distributing complimentary sick bags. It even led to someone lighting up a ciggy in the loo! Worst bumps we’ve experienced. Fortunately it all stopped at 1000m and the landing was very smooth.

The airport baggage system at Orlando is very odd. After collecting your luggage off the conveyor belt you then put your luggage on a conveyor belt again and watch it disappear whilst you take a train to the main terminal and wait it’s arrival. By the time Tilly arrived we’d had time for short kip and the airport was beginning to look like a ghost town. Still, she appeared intact and our taxi showed up instantly we walked out to the road to take us to our airbnb was very good.

The next day we assembled Tilly and had a test ride and within 1km we’d found a great vegetarian restaurant, seen plenty of cycle lanes and cycle route signs and met two cycle tourers. It almost feels like Europe, except no one’s walking around with a newspaper under their arm with the word Brexit on it, and I’d promised not to do that….

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