Inspiration

The word on the street is that Stonehenge aint all that compared to what is in Avebury. Wow ye mean there is better than a World Heritage site, along the same route, I cant be missing that. So I roll into Avebury village to find a huge stone circle.

Pasta in a bus shelter

We are talking boulders as big as a... well as big as boulders get in the world. Dragged along and placed in a field that would be pretty boring without them. I skipped the museum there and went straight into the field to get the low down off a few people who had been inside to hear all the different theories on why they bothered to build it. Also I just wanted to talk to people. Its interesting chatting to people to hear their own thoughts, personally I just like to be around stuff that was put in place ages back. Way back before anything really existed, back when people thought pushing boulders around was fun, suppose it would be like playing the Xbox for us now.

I love the place names

Stonehenge was next. The road signs stated that it was straight ahead, keep going, I'm tired, are we there yet? It was getting dark and the signs still said it was straight ahead. So I pull in and camp in a forest. Wake up the next morning and I go around the corner and Stonehenge is right beside the forest haaa. So next time your there ye cant miss the little forest I camped in.

I try not to think about the Blair Witch Project too much

Its a place I have been looking forward to visiting for a long time. It certainly gets you thinking about the old days, back when it was cool to pull a woman by the hair into your cave for some lovin. My theory is that there isnt any deep meaning to these places. They were not meant to around this long. It was just a fluke, it was a few drunk ass cavemen with nothin to do one Saturday night. The ice age had left a pile of rocks in one spot and for the craic, they decided to push them up on top of each other to show who was the strongest. Like when guys get drunk now and show off doing drunkin one arm push ups or giving each other dead arms for no reason. Fast forward six thousand years and we are being charged £6.50 to see a pile of rocks.

Is it just me or are they doing it doggie style?

South England was a big change from the Welsh valleys. At first I was put off by the lack of mountains but the flat crop fields grew on me. The quaint villages with oddly shaped houses and pubs were everywhere. The weather was crazy, one minute I am getting sun burned, the next its pouring down hailstones. When this happens I used to jump into my rain gear and continue on but now I just run for cover and pull out a book and chill. I was reading Paul Theroux, Kingdom By The Sea, about his trip around Britain but he was a bit grumpy for my liking right now so I started a John Grisham book instead, 50p at a charity book sale and ye cant go wrong with some court room drama.

Adventurous travel through a war torn country

So now I have made it to Jersey island and I am staying with Mono and Kate. Their flat has a stunning view of a hill top seaside castle. They have also kindly offered me an iPod shuffle which is still in its box unused so I will probably be taking up their generous offer after my old iPod went for a swim in the Welsh lake. I will gladly slum it in the "real world" and stay here for a few days to chill and catch up with Mono and Kate. UFC 90 is on Saturday night and I dont wanna miss that. I caught UFC 89 in Jacks house last week, seems like I am timing my visits to the UFC calender hmmmmm.

Coast to coast!

The news I keep up with at times can be a bit different than the 6 o clock news about insurance rates or road deaths over the bank holiday weekend. I like to know what is going on in my world, not the world of shares, I dont have any. The world I am interested in is about science, nature and adventure. So I read sites like nationalgeographic or TED. I also religiously check some blogs, like Alastair Humphreys. I like to get motivated and inspired by what I read on a day to day basis.

I spend most of my day trying not to cycle over beautiful creatures like this

Evan Tanners blog is one which I have enjoyed the most. He is a UFC cage fighter who kept a very honest and open blog in which he talked about his struggles through life in detail. He traveled all around America in many ways and took random snapshots on a crappy digital camera. The shots were never really framed like most peoples, he just clicked away to show his life from day to day. He liked his alone time which I can appreciate but he also had many great friends. He had a unique outlook on life and wanted to see and do it all. I could relate to how he talked about life and his place in the world. I felt like I had made many of the same fundamental changes in my life that he has.



His latest trip he had been planning was to go alone by motor bike out into the desert, way out there. Well it appears he found his limit. It looks like he died from heat exposure after running out of petrol and water. I was sitting in a cafe when I seen the news online and got really sad, the same sadness I felt when Steve Irwin died. I truly feel my world is worse off without him. He was flawed in many ways like all of us, he was no saint. But there are no saints, just real people with real problems. Its how we progress in life that should define us, not the moments when we slip but what we do when we have a chance to turn our lives around.



There are many ways of looking at his death. But once your brown bread does it really matter how or why it happened. Its over for him. All you can do is go through life and try make the right honest decisions. To do it with a ton of passion. To do some good, to live free. To wake up with a smile on your face because you know that the day your about to have can happily be your last because you are being true to yourself. Be honest to that voice deep down that tells you how your living right now is bullshit, that its half arsed. To ignore that voice is wrong, if you hear it screaming you have to answer it. I did answer it and half the reason I have gone on this journey was because of Evans blog. The ride that has already given me so much and its only just begun. Strangers ask me why I am doing this? I do it because I can. Because one day I will take my last breath and have a flash back of my life and I want to be to able to just smile happily knowing I gave it everything I had.

Live like you mean it