I Wrote Your Name on My Bike (USA Day 6)

That’s it; time’s up. In just a few hours we leave for the first leg of our mammoth adventure. So today was about dotting the Ts and rolling the eyes: finding a kickstand for Amy, getting a professional fit so that her knees won’t go bad again, getting a good grasp of Brooklyn, adding the names of all of the friends and family who contributed to our birthday bikes to various corners of the frame in tipp-ex. They’ll be with us on every pedal stroke – what a feeling.

Deep in Brooklyn, we filmed one of the challenges for our travel videos, which today comprised me getting locals to say (or sing) words from New York New York. Boisterous mum-of-two Nandy was especially helpful after contributing her line, dancing up and down the street to recruit more passers-by and pulling her daughter out of a car to sing us a line. We worried, what with many lyrics to fulfil, that we’d be there for hours. In fact, I roped in so many willing participants that we were done in about as long as the actual song lasts, and celebrated with a slice of artichoke pizza so enormous that the original pie from which it was cut may technically count as a sixth borough of New York.

We sat on one of Brooklyn’s repurposed piers (now purely functioning for pleasure), bathing in the late sun and feeling oddly homesick. Tomorrow marks the beginning of a much larger chapter in this trip, and one that will, every single day, carry us further and further from England. New York was a bonus: far, far more brilliant than we’d expected and so much more than the admin-drenched prologue that we’d labelled it. We won’t stay this long in one place until we finish the whole trip, or until an unexpected injury or logistical problem halts us, but that won’t happen. Not even worth thinking about.

Anyway, on the cycle back to our apartment, Amy’s knee had a twinge.