July 31st : Where am I?

John Whitmore (Sir John to you) the celebrated saloon car racing champion is a friend of mine, and he was friendly enough to invite me to the car-crazy spectacle at Goodwood before I left England: Where I had the pleasure of sitting with John Surtees, one of the ultimate greats, the only man to win a Grand Prix in a car and on a motorcycle. That's MY helmet on the table. Wow! I returned home in mid-July and plunged immediately into a welter of paperwork. As a registered alien (that's why they give you a green card) I have to pay my dues to Uncle Sam just like everyone else, and I was already three months late. All along my 78,000 mile trail I have been collecting little scraps of paper with bizarre script on them, purporting to be receipts for currencies you've never heard of. Bundles of these notes have been winging their way home over the years, and now I have the delightful task of deciphering them all. They have brought me many nostalgic moments - how many Baht for an elephant? How many Libyan Dinar to enter Apolonia? How much for a Pina Colada on the Playa Coca? How many Kenyan shillings for a bootlegged video cassette? - so it wasn't all tedium, but most of it was. When my eyes refused to focus on Arabic numerals any longer, I went out to attack the weeds. A forest of four foot teazle plants was marching from the West to do battle with a jungle of blackberries advancing from the East. And then there's the gutter that's falling down, and the mice in the attic, and the broken water heater. A three-year accumulation of household chores. Occasionally I remember how lucky I am to have a home at all. At other times I curse it. It was bound to be an anti-climax. After all, what have I achieved that the world should wonder at? I proved 26 years ago, in a very public way, that a person could ride a motorcycle round the world and survive. Since then, hundreds of others have done it, and are doing it right now. As a physical accomplishment all I have to offer is that I am probably the oldest person to have carried out such a mission. Big Deal! Offers to establish a new category in the Guiness Book of Records number approximately zero. What I can take pride and pleasure in is the narrative I was able to sustain on my web site. Taken as whole it represents quite a large body of work. I think it is unique, and I suppose it has a value quite aside from the book I expect to write in the coming months, so it seems fair to offer it to you as its own thing. Most of my time, since I finished doing my taxes, has been taken up in completing a CD of the entire journey. Unlike the earlier CD of the first half, this one is restructured and packed with a lot of extra pictures, many of them going back to the seventies, by way of contrast. I hope it will hold your attention until the book is done. You can order it now. Anyone who already bought the earlier CD will get it at a large discount. I have a list. Here's John again, wishing he could have raced this unlikely looking propeller-driven car, built long before he was born. And he's no Spring chicken.