Well that’s it… the adventure is over … for a while. I have finally arrived in England. I am in an internet cafe in London, and I have a bit of time before the money runs out so I thought that I would share the last part of my American travels with you crazy kids…
From Belize I jumped a flight to Miami where I stayed the night. Miami was an excellent choice, it offered all the creature comforts that the modern day retiree could want. It is like the Gold Coast only super sized, same as everything else in America. Everybody who lives there was born in New York, has spent about three decades too long in the sun and spend their days riding the bus looking for unsuspecting victims to tell how much better their life had been when they lived in New York.
The plan was to catch up with a friend who lived in the “small town” of Stuart (about 3 hours north of Miami and with a population of 130 000) before following my teen idols – Jason, Kylie and the entire 80’s cast of Neighbours – in seeking fame and fortune in the motherland. I caught the Greyhound up to West Palm Beach where I missed my connection to Stuart. I was planning on getting a hotel when K-Dog, a guy that I meet on the bus offered for me to crash on the floor of his mates house. The cheapest hotel I could find was about US$40 so it would have been rude of me if I didn’t. K-Dog had just got out of prison but seemed like a solid citizen who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. He showed me some of the poetry that he had written in prison, it wasn’t bad.
The next day I ventured up to the thriving metropolis of Stuart, where I spent a couple of days with Chris and Mike. Chris works at a mariner hobnobbing it with the rich and famous golf playing retirees of Southern Florida while her boyfriend Mike is a fire-fighter. I got to see the station that he worked at but was very disappointed to learn that there was no fire-pole.
Fire fighting in Stuart is no where near as good a deal as what they get in South Gippsland, there is no beer or bbq’s and you have to turn up on days other than Sunday. Lighting forest fires is even frowned upon. Although Chris and Mike’s eating habits were a little “alternative” they were really fantastic people and I had a banger of a time. I think that the best bit of my stay there was when Mike told me a ripper story that he had heard about a left-handed serial rapist named K-Dog.
So that’s it. The New World adventure had come to an end and it was time to head to England, the home of countless bad TV soaps, mushy peas and flat beer served at room temperature (which is not too bad).