Good evening! There is a lot to tell so let’s not dilly dally.
.
Miami – I was staying in a youth hostel and was friends with Terry, Teddy, Valery, Fred, Laura, Jess, Matt, Tim, Nick, Chris, Mark, Cindy, Minesh, Rich, Rebecca, Sebastian, Becky, Ivan, Alex, Catherine and Marilyn. I was not friends with Hamzah. South Beach in Miami is a holiday resort and a party town. The only way to experience any place is to embrace it and so I joined the others: early afternoons were hungover, late afternoons to early morning drunk and late morning asleep/passed out.
.
There was a lot of football, volleyball and frisbee on the beach. But mostly the beach was too hot and so we played in the sea. I went snorkelling with Mark one day and we met a remora (shark sucker). They attach themselves to sharks or boats by suction and are pretty harmless but it is difficult to be so rational when you feel it trying to attach to your nipple. Mark later admitted that he fought so hard against the fish that afterwards he was genuinely scared that he would drown as he had no energy left to make it back to shore. One day I went with Terry, Teddy, Valery and Fred to a pool party. We had paid $10 for entry at the hostel and when we arrived realised we had been duped. There were 30 middle-aged people asleep around a pool, there was music but you couldn’t hear it because the real party was next door and their music was booming. So obviously we climbed the wall. We landed in the middle of the 10 year anniversary of Aqua-girl. We were 4 guys amongst 2000 women, standing in the middle of a lesbian pool party. It was one of my most memorable days ever. Some nights we ended in the dive bar down the road, playing pool of course. Some nights we went to the beach, sometimes we wangled our way into a club (I never paid) and other nights we never made it out the hostel.
.
At the hostel there was food going missing from the kitchen and so I started writing notes on the door (my final one was: “you despicable, low-level piece of shit. You know who you are you ball-licking, hamster-hugging pervert. Have my can of tomatoes, they are yours. But I hope you get swine flu, you seat-sniffing, tuna-thieving ball of hairy scrotum. Rot in hell for the devaluation you are the sole culprit for in the level of humanity. Sweat in your sleep you dick. Love as always, John). Hamzah was the thief, or at least one of them as I caught him with one of my beers (no one else drank Busch), he received a further tirade.
.
I ended up staying in Miami for almost 3 weeks. All the time I was looking for boats out of there but without success. The only option would have cost $1600, and that depended on finding someone to share a room with. So having made it from England to Miami by land and sea I then held my nose as I booked myself onto a flight back to Europe. I flew back to Paris on Monday 18th, a little disappointed to end it in that way but at the same time aware that it would have been stupid to spend so much money that I don’t have just to be able to say I didn’t fly (and in terms of emmissions, cruise and freighter ships are hardly better than flying). From Paris I took the eurotunnel to London, and then a train back to Great Missenden. Then one final hill to climb and I was back at Thimble Farm Cottage. No one was home of course except my dog. I had been looking forward to a cup of tea but thought better of it when I found a can of London Pride in the kitchen, then I made myself beans on toast, found a second can of the good stuff and sat in the garden with my dog while I waited for my parents to get home.
.
So that is it. I will put up stats from the trip soon (it’s the kind of person I am). The trip is over. Plans for the next one have begun.