On August 5, I landed in Luton airport just outside of London right before midnight and so, instead of riding my bike at night, I decided to spend my very first night in Britain in style – on the floor of the departure lounge in front of gate 7. A very friendly British family on their way to Ibiza offered me wine and crackers while their kids raced around the terminal in the airport wheelchairs and I mapped out the ride to London from the airport. The next day I mounted all my gear on my bike and headed south for the big city like a bat outta hell. I never realized how far 50 miles was before! My very first day of cycling with all my crap on my bike and I decide to push forward for 50 miles over the hills that make up the nothingness that is the area around London. At least the weather was nice. Who says Britain is always rainy? Every time I had to trudge up a huge hill, doubts would fill my head about my ability to finish this crazy journey. I dreamt of public transportation and changing my airline reservations to an earlier date. I was already honestly thinking about quitting! Needless to say, I finally made it and collapsed under the Marble Arch in downtown London. When my body agreed to start functioning again, I contacted my friend Bob whose vacation just happened to coincide with mine – this proved to be more difficult than we thought because our mobile phones didn’t seem to get along with the British satellites. We finally found each other and decided to see some quality theater seeing as though Spain doesn’t appreciate the modern musical. We saw Chicago and it wasn’t all that great. Something about Brits trying to act with American accents just didn’t fly. OK, next came a fairly huge turning point in my vacation. After only two days in London, someone stole my friggin bicycle! I locked it up nice and tight with my heavy-duty bike lock and, not three hours later, I returned to find neither my bike, my lock, nor my handy-dandy bike computer that tells you how fast you’re going and how far you’ve gone. I quickly decided that London sucks. I stayed for a few more days in some dodgy hostel that was rumored to have bedbugs and did a few touristy things like have staring contests with the wax figures in Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum (Nelson Mandela kicked my butt).