Friday 3 June 2011

Last day of luxury

After Wednesday's nightmares, Thursday was a much nicer day all in all.
Didnt sleep much coming into Thursday morning, so decided to wake up early and get a few bits ready before an early breakfast at the hotel.
My Samsung netbook wasnt working, so I had to make a decision to either try and get it fixed, or get some sort of replacement. I also needed to pick my bike up from BikeBeat (quite important!) as the previous days woes meant I arrived too late to do so Wednesday.

So had an early breakfast, went for a swim in the hotel pool and did a bit of packing. The hotel staff have been very helpful, and I was basically offered a free taxi service for the day! First stop was a BestBuy to sort out the laptop. Whilst it probably can be fixed, it would have taken a few days days I didnt have. So in the end I decided to bite the bullet and get a new one. I am now the proud (but slightly begrudging) owner of an ASUS EeePC. Lets hope it works a bit better than the old one.
After buying some cous cous (excellent light weight food) from a nearby store, I got picked up by Jeff the driver/hotel engineer and dropped off at BikeBeat. The staff there were very friendly and had done a great job rebuilding my ride. They wished me luck, and I was off on my next stop – UPS. I decided to mail my old laptop back home, and try to get it fixed under warrenty. Didnt want to be carrying it with me on my trip as it would be the epitome of dead weight. After a bit of confusion over our shared language, I managed to get my laptop mailed home (note if you casually use the word 'shipped' this becomes a whole lot more expensive!). Then a quick trip to Kmart for some wash kit stuff and back to the hotel.
Spoke to Clare on Skype, and then set up my new laptop and began downloading all the programs I would need (Chrome, Open Office, Sony picture browser etc) and also documenting all the kit I would be taking. In my next blog post I will list all my kit – there seems to be a lot of it!

Popped back out on my bike to Subway for some late lunch. Even this short trip made me realise its going to be very hot on the bike when I set off. Had some lunch, and then started feeling a bit sleepy. I had slept so little in the last 2 days, but I didnt want to drift off too early as I needed my body clock to at least be roughly in sync with US time. But by about 5 it was becoming difficult to stay awake. I woke again about 10pm, watched a bit of the NBA playoffs match, and then went back to sleep. Woke at about 4am, but feel a lot better than yesterday morning.

Have decided to stick to the original plan of starting today (friday). Probably leave about 10ish. Hopefully get a lift up to the start, dip my wheel and be on my way. Its really quite scary to think I have 3 months of this ahead. But also very exciting!

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations on getting underway and looking forward to keeping track of your progress

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  2. Im glad you managed to dip your back wheel in the Atlantic :-) am looking forward to meeting you at the Pacific, for the front wheel dipping ceremony. I have found out the address of The Goonies house in Astoria :-) the film Overboard was also filmed there too :-)

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