Thats it I suppose.

One small era for me has finished.

It started one day when I decided to go on a long journey, and I thought then that it would finish when I reached the southerly most city in Argentina. But it didn’t. Instead I feel like this chapter of my life has just now come to an end 18 months after finishing the physical bicycle journey. I’m sitting on platform 3 at Bristol train station, waiting for the 1 O’clock to take both me and Achilles back to Manchester.

Yesterday evening I gave a presentation and did a small book signing at Bristol Grammar School, and that event was the last of a miniature tour of the country promoting my book. And now I feel like ‘Take A Seat’ has been completed – what started out as something that could easily have been brushed off, curtailed and forgotten, turned into a two year journey, a documentary and a book. Only here though, under the cavernous and translucent station roof has the sun chosen to shine down and allow me to believe this is real. I think people call this smelling the roses. I’m doing that now. This instant. It won’t last long, I’ll get whisked back into frantically pondering the near future, so I’m writing this moment down to ensure that I can recall in future what it felt like to feel like something has been completed. Rarely do things feel completed, and rarely are they I suppose – its so difficult to identify an ending to one thing and a beginning to the next, reality has a funny way of braiding life’s stories almost seamlessly together.

I spent the last 3 days traveling with Ben Scott down from Manchester to Bristol on Achilles the tandem, the very same Achilles that has propelled me further than any other machine I’ve ridden in or on. Except for planes. But they don’t count.

From Chorlton street we cycled south only unsteady for a mile or so, Ben quickly adapting to ‘handing over the reins’ and relaxing in the warm  and lazy Sunday traffic. Soon we were immersed in the saturated greens of the english countryside, made all the greener by a cloudless blue sky. With wanderlust often taking my mind away from my own shores I sometimes forget that I live on a very special island indeed. After only a couple of hours back in the saddle I was reminded of this again. In the mid-afternoon we stopped in Wybunbury for a relaxed pint knowing we only had twenty miles to cover to get to my friend Nick’s house a little north of Telford. We sat at a little wooden table in the pub’s beer garden. In front of me was an old and immaculately maintained traction engine blowing off steam in front of the pub. Behind me was an old church, one that I learnt had had its tower repaired and straightened by engineers that went on to take a few degrees of dangerous lean off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The sun shone warm on the bright red ‘Pimms’ umbrella above us, the grass was green and the only sound was one of sleepy conversation and the hissing of steam from the engine that minutes later made its way solidly up the small road from where we’d come. This is England – the picture postcard England that still thankfully exists.

In less than two weeks I leave this pleasant land once more to craft the opening paragraphs of the next small chapter of my life in the big country with Ernest Greenwald. I’ve lost count of how many chapters I’ve had so far, but however many I’ve had, Ernie has had many many more.

Importantly though, I can now, finally, say that I’m pretty happy with the last one, the ‘Take A Seat’ chapter. It has formed the foundations for my new career – career sounds so clinical, but ‘life’ in this context sounds too pretentious and cut’n’dried. They say that if you do what you love come what may, you’ll never work another day in your life. I feel like, thanks to the encouragement and help of thousands of people, I might just be starting to believe that for myself.

If you’ve been unwise, bored or in the most unusual of cases interested enough to have followed the Take A Seat journey from it’s conception, you might remember a man that uttered such timeless quotes as “I feel like an abused porn star”, and “that ends my portion on the bike thank God” – the first of my 270 companions to ride on Achilles the tandem, way up in the very north of Alaska, in a world that exists almost before life creeps into the earth from underground.

That was Charlie Kunken, a man I described as a cameo from the A-Team, sporting a US flag bandanna and a handsome and awe inspiring  handlebar mustache – the kind Burt Reynolds would hunger for. The same man, though clean shaven and somehow innocent looking came face to face with me again at my book launch in south west London. Not only was this wayward New Yorker on the same continent as me once more, he was in the same country, and he wanted to read a story that he’d help start.

Lying in bed a week later, with a mild champagne hangover the morning after the grandiose wedding of two friends of mine, I recognized an opportunity too good to miss. Achilles the tandem was in London. So was I. So was Charlie. This moment, this brief convergence of paths had to be profited from……I had 3 hours before I had to be at the train station, and I had that kind of an unnatural hunger that only a hangover can create, and only a thoroughly greasy full english breakfast can cure. I called Charlie.

An hour later, there he was, in front of Burger King in Victoria station and the long over-due catch-up began. He had a day or twos growth on his face, making him a fraction more recognizable than he was, squeaky clean and desk-job like at my book launch.

An hour after that, after a short bus ride, and after my friends who were looking after Achilles has locked themselves out of the house whilst waving us goodbye (and after I’d got a rose thorn wedged between my shoulder blades while climbing over their roof to unlock the door from the inside), Charlie was bobbing eagerly away behind me on the bike, every bit as uncomfortable as he’d remembered.

After the breakfast I’d been longing for all morning, we rode through the streets of London reminiscing, talking about Alaska, his new job, and everything in-between. Riding dangerously close to traffic on the embankment heading towards the houses of Parliament, Charlie mentioned that this was roughly the route of his commute to work. “Its nice” he said, “but the worst thing about it is that at the end of the commute I arrive at work”. Classic. I looked over my shoulder at him and saw a man eager to escape on another adventure.

He left me at the entrance to platform 13 at Euston, and after forcing the ticket woman to snap a photo of us, he walked back up into the station while I cantered along the platform with Achilles to head up to book signings in Manchester. Charlie was the first companion on the bike (well, other than my dad way back on the test run in Blighty), and he was the last (well, except for the fella that’ll ride it back to the bike’s manufacturers in Bristol).

Before leaving he pressed something into my hand. I looked down to see the freshly laundered USA bandana that he’d been wearing when I’d first met him. “I’d be honored if you’d take this on your next adventure” he said smiling.

I certainly will Mr Kunken. I certainly will.

Three days ago I sat and watched a herring gull float on a keen wind, subtly changing the angles of its dagger-like wings to stay motionless above the earth. It was looking at something, one beady eye in its cocked head fixed on an object below. I have no idea what it was, it could have been one of a million ever-moving bits of flotsam or discarded food. One thing I was sure of though was that it wasn’t the shimmer or flash of a small fish near the surface of an ocean. I was in london, and below the gull, and below the huge brick red towers near Kings Cross, the Euston road thronged with buses, taxis and a sea of people making there way from their last engagement to the next. When the lights changed, I twisted my right hand, gunned the engine of the bike and nipped ahead, profiting in distance from a small gap between two idling double deckers.

I’d been in Western House – one of the BBC’s buildings off Portland Place – on and off for most of the day, chatting to a variety of friendly sounding anchors of regional radio shows in a small sound booth equipped with a microphone and a headset. The line went live, I would be greeted and ten or fifteen minutes of hearty conversation about my book or about Ernie or about other characters that rode on the back seat of Achilles would follow, before the line went dead again, and I’d wander out into the street for an hour or so before the next one. A small rag tag collection of ‘paps’ waited outside. They looked up very briefly when I left the building, instantly gauging I was not suitable prey for them. Indeed, most staff in the BBC complex and other establishments I’d been in that day understandably assumed I was a bike courier. That got me thinking about a celebrity consultancy business. I could give lectures entitled “How to slip under the Paparazzi radar” and I could sell lightweight dummy bike helmets and walkietalkies that even the most delicate of ‘oh so important’ pin-ups could carry and fool the press with. On second thoughts, maybe I won’t bother.

The reason for my extended London visit was the launch of my book, for which I had a modest but spirited celebration in El Barrio, a lovely latin bar in Battersea. People came who I never dreamt would come. Charlie, the once all American and now trimmed and manicured first companion I’d had on the back of Achilles. Guy, a man I’d last seen when I was perhaps twelve, at school where I’m fairly sure I was a bit of a bully though he ensures me I wasn’t! Caroline from Germany, Barney who’s japes kept me entertained through Ecuador and Peru, Nadia, who I’d shared a beer with chasing the last rays of desert sun across the small square of Uyuni in Bolivia, my fairy godchildren and of course my dear ol’dad and once cycling companion through the hills of Colombia.

It was a humbling experience to see so many close friends turn out, support and hopefully enjoy the embryonic opening stages of a career I awkwardly call Adventure film making and writing. If you’re reading this, you all know who you are. I’m more than grateful for your company that evening.

Now the madness of london fun has come to an end. I have one or two more book signings to do up North near my current home, but what I really need to focus on is the next project. The Dom and Ernie Project (www.domandernie.com). I no longer have nothing to lose. Last time I was on a glorified schoolboy adventure. If it didn’t work out it didn’t matter. Now I have chosen my path, I am responsible for someone else, and to an extend responsible for their hopes and dreams as well as my own. There is, very definitely, something to lose. So much so in fact, that I better go. I have money to chase, cameras to beg for, insurance to ponder and scoff at, and a small bolus of self doubt to stamp out each time it wells up like an unsightly boil.  Three weeks and counting…..

Life drifts by. It just does, irrespective of how hard you grab it. You can’t even change the number of experiences you fit into every second, all you can do is control what kind of experiences you have in those fleeting moments. You could try the eye watering rush of plummeting earthwards attached to an elastic chord, and why not? Its an easy way to feel alive. But what about sitting on a curbstone watching the comings and going of a hundred people on the sidewalk? That is just as worthy, maybe more so, but people don’t seem to think about that, I forget it sometimes and catch myself not looking around when surrounded by ‘normality’. And in that one moment of tunnel vision, I’ve wasted what’s around me. Then, during other moments, I get a great deal of pleasure out of studying the little things….

Across from me there is a man, an older man, perhaps 70, absorbed deeply in a book. His jaw works enthusiastically on a piece of bread without thought, all his power focussed on ‘The Geneva Deception’ – some crime or war novel I’d imagine. It looked like a pot boiler, but whatever, that doesn’t matter.

At the same time time the  2 girls behind the counter of the cafe whispered to each other, then one of them removed a small fairy cake with pink icing from under a glass bell where it was displayed. They put it on a plate and walk it over to him. He looked down at the cake, smiled a wide, open smile then looked up at the girl who put it on the table. He had pale grey eyes. His smile was child-like, honest, genuinely surprised and pleased. He carried on smiling and then smiled equally pleased over at the girl still behind the counter, his eyebrows raised in delight. They’d surprised him with a gift and he tucked into it with the same enthusiasm as he had the piece of bread, but giving it undivided and surgical attention for a second as he cut it in two. Then he tucked back into his novel, chewing rapidly, as if eating up the words as well as the cake.

Maybe he was a regular here, I expect he was. Either way, it was a nice, simple, pleasing interaction that was fun to watch, and satisfying I’d imagine for everyone involved. Seems to be the little things like this that keeps the world just about spinning straight and level. Just about. It only took two minutes to suck that small chunk of life around me up. It was more than worthwhile.

Self pity is pathetic. I hate it, but I gather vast piles of it around me on occasion. The pity weighs heavy and crushes me into a very dark place that neither laughter or sunlight will drag me out of until something – it could be anything but I suspect it chemical- changes. Or is it chemical? Is it not just some little glitch, some deep seated worry or insecurity that cracks through the surface of who I am when I’m stressed? The only thing I can liken it to is a very severe bout of heart ache.

Thats another word I never really believed in until now. Stress. That was for sissies that didn’t know what it felt like to really make an effort, to pull their finger out. I am immune to such weaknesses….I thought. But now, over the last few days, I’ve noticed stuff to indicate otherwise. Waking up at strange times of the night with my brain apparently operating irrespective of whether I’m conscious or not. Dry Skin??? Flippin’ dandruff?? I never had that but now I notice flecks of skin falling when I scratch my head. Must drink more water, must sleep more. It will go away…..

A lot of you reading this may say ‘hey kid, you don’t know the half of it’ – well perhaps I don’t, I’m definitely lucky in that I’ve never had to worry about losing all my possessions, whether I’ll have food to eat tomorrow or a place to sleep. But worry is relative. The mind will worry as much as you give it space to I guess, whatever the problem. Right now that problem is my immediate future. I am carving a new furrow ahead of me, I am chasing my dreams, I am doing what Disney movies preach all the time, be who you want to be. I am trying, but ambition is a dangerous thing. It makes you greedy for inspiration and success. And Happiness. The bar is set high and for each and every step of the approach I think its too high for me to clear. I’ve cleared it before. I’ll clear it again – I say clenching my teeth – I hope.

This time around will be the real test. Anyone can luck out on one project, but the second one says a lot, suddenly there is something to lose. On top of that this next one – The Dom and Ernie Project – involves an elderly, sick man. Am I really putting this many obstacles between me and what I want to achieve? I suppose I am. Moments like now I ask why, but I already know the answer. The bigger the challenge, the more fruitful the reward, but more importantly in this case the more possibility I have of inspiring others. Without Ernie, this project would be nothing. Pointless. He is this story, he will be it’s success. So despite the fact that right now I feel like a paraplegic with a bad bout of asthma I’m going to try and carry on with the run up, and after that all there is to do is jump as high as I can……

Airports are strange places. I’ve been going through a lot of them recently. They’re no longer mildly exciting – like they are when you’re a child going on holiday – but they do somehow stimulate some strange reflective feeling inside me. Its as if the impartial stop-gap between worlds gives my brain a clinical environment in which to breath. 1 or 2 hours to contemplate and take stock of my immediate past as well as pondering my future, without either of these encroaching on the glossy vinyl, angular glass or background chatter of the inner sanctum – the departure lounge.

I’m currently sitting in Dallas Fort Worth Airport, at gate D22 awaiting a flight to London Heathrow. Its 70 degrees fahrenheit, clear skies and little chance of turbulence until at least half way across the Atlantic. I’ve come from North Carolina, where in Boone hundreds of people were gracious enough to show their appreciation for my film, showing as part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. Like in the other film festivals I have attended, and like on my bicycle journey, I was absorbed into the community and treated like family.

Yesterday I sat under a sharp blue sky after climbing to the top of Ship Rock with new friends from the university, staring out at rippling rows of forested ridges fading into an ever deepening blue in the distance. Two hours later I was talking to an enthusiastic crowd who had congregated in a courtyard in Boone to quiz me on any knowledge I might have to offer in the field of adventure travel. Most of these people had seen my documentary. They had liked it, and told me so. That sunny afternoon I realized that I was on a path that made me happy. Its going to take a lot more map reading to ensure I remain on track, but in brief shards of sunlit contentedness, I realize – thanks to these people mostly – its probably worth it.

After a dream-like rest in the Gideon Ridge Inn, I travelled to the airport, and now is the in-between time. I travel back to a land that is likely to be rainswept. Isn’t it always when one flies back to the old country? But trying to look beyond that and the haze of normalness that is hard to get to grips with when returning from an unfamiliar place, the future is exciting. The Dom and Ernie Project start is only eight weeks away. Thats unnerving and exhilarating all at once. So much to do before then, funding to come by, a book to launch, video to edit, bills to pay and the search for some way to stay solvent for at least the next two to three months.

Someone is writing a journal next to me in a small exercise book – actually they’ve finished now. Does the airport represent the same thinking space for them? I guess it might. She’s just found the world clock utility on her iPhone. Fancy. I wonder what time it is. Time to go soon I guess. I’ve pondered enough for now.

This is what happens when you spend a lot of time on public transport or in airports. I think. About where I’ve been, what I’ve done, where I’m going and where I want to be. Then I write – actually truth be told the thinking never finishes before the writing starts, I’m too impatient, and consequently, the words are probably jumbled and poorly planned.

Sitting here, next to a plug socket and some kind of service door next to gate 27 in San Diego airport, I’m thinking about the month I’ve spent in the states. I started in Utah where I was immediately embraced in the arms of the Bowman family, not just ‘hosting’ my stay in conjunction with the Banff Mountain Film Festival, but treating me like family, as did their close friends. If anyone is used to feeling comfortable with almost complete strangers its me, but I wouldn’t expect others to feel the same way. In so many cases in the last few years of my life however, they seem to. I refuse to believe that the only reason I meet such lovely people is through luck. No way, otherwise the only lottery ticket I’ve ever bought would have turned me into a millionaire. I’t didn’t.

Then, After Utah, it was LA where others – also almost without exception complete strangers – welcomed me into their fold. I don’t necassarily have a lot in common with some of these people, and my sometimes over-critical attitude had to be reined in as I encountered very little of the shallowness that LA is famous for. Then, from one extreme to the other – Lompoc, where Ernie  – the linch pin of my journey over the pond – tolerated me sleeping within a foot of him on the fold down booth in the RV. I might be less surprised if Ernie was my age, but he’s more than twice that and very often it seems that the older one gets, the more inflexible one becomes in terms of habits and breaking them. Ernie could, justifiably, have accused me of being a bossy unsympathetic slave driver, but he didn’t, he even seemed to enjoy my visit – a relief given we will be spending 4-5 months together.

Then south to spend time with the people that cradled my two wheeled journey on both sides of the US/Mexican border three years ago. Things have changed, the children have grown, families have divided or fused, memories have shifted slowly over time like chinese whispers. But the kindness is just the same.

Strangely, and perhaps stupidly, the seemingly ubiquitous kindness makes me sad or confused. After more than two transient years in the saddle with ever changing stimuli, I already have an unhealthy fear of getting stuck in one place. It would be a little easier to do however a bit of nastiness corralled me in to one small friendly space. But it doesn’t. You can find kindness everywhere if you’re not counting the cracks in the pavement.

I’m grateful to all of you for making my life so pleasantly frustrating…..

I’ve been sitting on this train for ten minutes and its almost as if to my left its still the same cresting and rolling wave I’ve been following since I boarded. I left Ernie at the single isolated platform of the aptly named Surf station. I saw him waving vaguely at an invisible me somewhere behind the heavily tinted glass.

This wide open land and the act of saying goodbye – albeit it only for a couple of short months – has put me in a strange state of mind. Sad, almost, but determined to succeed in the plan that has just over the last week, from the home-base of Ernie’s RV, become reality.

Yesterday Ernie and I went for a ride together on our new bicycle, a semi recumbent tandem that allows Ernie to sit, reclining up front with a 180 degree view uninterrupted by handlebars. Thanks to the coasting mechanism between us, he can put in only as much effort as he wants to. We cycled 22 miles to the ocean and back along the agricultural valley that forms a gentle east to west corridor from Lompoc to the coast. Ernie was bundled up in jeans, braces and a thick plaid shirt – he feels the cold what with the blood thinners he has to take, and he gets short of breath quickly. Thats what Lymphocytic Leukemia does. Through a slow proliferation of white blood cells, it crowds out the red cells, very, very slowly suffocating you.

But 74 year old Ernie has one more dream. And he can achieve it – I’m sure of it – with a little help. Maybe not quite how he had in minds many years ago, but hopefully he’ll discover a country he has not yet had the opportunity to explore by bicycle.

Ernie has a bracelet. I read it with a mix of amusement and concern. It reads:

Ernest Greenwald. Lompoc California. If my heart stops please do not resuscitate me. If I died on my bike I died happy.

Ernie’s last wife had died after a long painful period of battling illness. His life had stopped after that, as if it had had the battery taken out. Six months after that day I rolled through Lompoc on my way south on Achilles the tandem – that was two years ago. Ernie pulled himself together enough to join me for a day’s pedaling to Santa Barbara and in doing so helped me see a valuable side to my journey – an adventure that others could, in some small way benefit from. I liked that. It made everything seem a little more worthwhile.

“I cannot begin to describe the pleasure and pain I’ve been feeling today” he’d said, hobbling off the bike after a hot shadeless 60 miles. He seemed to have turned a corner, and the stoop in his walk had lessened. He was smiling.

He’d made the mistake of telling me that day that forty years previously, he’d always planned on cycling across his own country. If he hadn’t said that I may not have seen him again. I wouldn’t have sourced a suitable bike for the job and I certainly wouldn’t been quietly chiding Ernie for his funny habits while sitting in his RV. We set off from the west coast at the end of June this year, accompanied by a film camera, Ernie’s RV for him to sleep in and his two small dogs from whom he will not be parted.

He bought his bracelet before I whispered the idea of our journey in his ear, so I can be sure I didn’t coerce him into wearing this statement. I don’t think our journey will kill him, in fact I’m sure of it. But Ernie is that kind of guy. He agonizes over the blue prints and the statistics of every eventuality. Jesus, everything in this man’s life follows a thorough monitoring. He’s drilled a hole in the top of his small kettle in order to put a temperature gauge in it, not satisfied with the bubbling of boiling water as an indicator. He has three clocks in his tiny RV. One digital one is hung next to the traditional  clock on the end wall next to the small but perfectly formed bathroom. Another clock, he told me, is hidden out of sight, because he said, taking on an air of extreme accuracy, ‘with only two clocks you cannot tell which one is wrong’. In every way this man is a self professed nerd.

At the age of fifteen he scrounged relays and circuitry from old pinball machines to construct an electronic tick tack toe board that never lost even if the human opponent played the first move. He was discounted from winning a regional science competition due to the fact that ‘he must have had considerable adult help’. He didn’t mind though. Its not in his nature to worry over ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’. Having now lived with Ernie for a few short days, I know he wouldn’t have needed help, his intelligence is so immense that it overflows into the social aptitude part of his brain, clogging it up occasionally, leaving him unable to compute simple humour or body language. Doctors call it Asperges disease, but like a friend of mine once said to me, we have so many labels these days they don’t mean much anymore. I prefer to call Ernie a proud sufferer of ‘Nerdiness’.

But underneath that carapace of binary and logic there are a deep set of emotions. He thinks about the past, about his shortfalls, about his children and about the days he let slip buy with ‘undue care and attention’. And looking carefully I think I recognize something like sadness.

Now I’ve been on this train heading south for one hour and still things are the same. On one side is the deep blue, broken with the darker shadows of waves growing in from the ocean. The other side is a vivid green, folding with the less regular shadows of tight valleys and empty cattle grazing hills. The Californian coastline here is an empty, organized wilderness.

The next time I’ll see this place will be in June, maybe on my birthday. But then I’ll be heading north ready to cycle east with Ernie, over the rockies and into the searing heat of the desert sun. And on, to the sea. One more goal completed. One more dream lived for Ernie. Hopefully.

Its never too late to live the dream.