It's Saturday evening in New York...and I'm still in New York. I just ended up being under-prepared for a departure this morning, and luckily my roommate allowed me to stay an extra day. But worry not, I'm perfectly on course for leaving tomorrow.

My head swims with emotions and feelings I can't articulate. I am at once electrified and terrified; positive and doubtful. My mental state is struggling to deal with the logistics of packing everything I own onto a bike, combined with planning a trip into the unknown. It is pushed to breaking point when I actually consider the realities of what lies beyond the front door.

But this is my dream. Undoubtedly I have been unsuccessful in some key areas of my organisation, and it is a matter of fact that I will fail in many more over the coming days and weeks. But isn't this the learning curve? I sure hope so. The happiest I have been in the last few days has been on my practice rides, with various stages of a fully loaded bike. This comforts me no end. I am prepared for loneliness, discomfort, uncertainty and fear. I have been dealing with them to a certain degree during my planning stages. But wait...I am also ready for exhilaration, euphoria, experiences that will blow me away. The two-edged sword of the 'unknown' I guess.

Anyway, enough of this....I shall depart for real tomorrow...updates soon....

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Don’t listen to what anyone says. It is a magical place, full of unique sights, sounds, smells, people. I don’t think there’s anywhere else quite like it, and this is something to be thankful for. A couple of days ago I was blessed with a rare morning off from the normal rigours of my current routine, and I decided that instead of my standard morning cycle, I would make the trip that thousands of New Yorkers do every year when the sun reappears in the sky – I was headed for Coney Island.

I awoke early enough to avoid fellow revelers who had a similar idea of sun, sand and sea, but I couldn't avoid the Brooklyn Rush Hour Traffic. My route takes me from down Myrtle Avenue until I hit Vanderbilt –a street that transforms midway from a pothole-ridden nightmare full of badly parked cars, into a road characteristic of why Brooklyn is becoming a veritable biker’s inner-city paradise. A broad cycle path leads me smoothly to the Grand Army Plaza. Consisting of concentric circles arrange as streets, this is not only the Brooklyn equivalent of the Arc d’Triompe, but also forms the entrance to Prospect Park.