I’d originally thought that this would be more or less a standard travel blog post about the first leg of this new bike tour that I am doing, but as I think about what all has gone into it, and how everything is shaking out, it’s looking like I am going to have to frame things in such a way that this post is going to begin yet another bizarre OG adventure.
Shucks. I know. I think out of the hundreds of posts on this blog, there are maybe two or three that I would consider showing someone in order to demonstrate that that I am a mature and adjusted 21st century adult. Maybe that’s because I’m not.
So yeah, this is going to be a post about riding a bicycle through Florida. First, though, I’m going to have to tell you what made me decide to do that.
If you’ve read my Texas Tour post, you’ll remember that in order to get some of my documents for my immigration packet to Israel I had to go get them in person. I was messing around with letters and mail and e-mails for months in each case, but the universe just didn’t want it to happen, and through bizarre coincidences and unexpected difficulties, I got to the point where I actually went to Colorado to get my marriage certificate, took a trip back to mom in Arizona to get my divorce certificate, and rode my bike all over Texas to get my birth certificate.
I did, though, finally get all the documents and handed them to the Jewish Agency for Israel with a completed packet. The first document review went fine, though they added a requirement for another document about my daughter which I was able to add without any difficulty. However, they did another review and told me that I needed a criminal background check from Germany because I had lived there for more than six months.
So, I went through a process of trying to get one and encountered a number of ridiculous difficulties that made the Texas, Colorado, and Arizona document quests look simple. Really, I could write an entire blog post about this, all the things that went wrong trying to get this background check, but you just wouldn’t believe me. I’m trying to think of a detail or two to give an idea, but the best one I can come up with is that I actually paid an immigration lawyer $500 to get this thing for me, and he wasn’t able to do it either. I’ll just leave it at that because I don’t want to be put into a padded cell. At one point my immigration counselor at Nefesh B’Nefesh, a private organization that helps Jews get everything together for immigrating to Israel (“making Aliyah,” it’s called) told me that if the thing really ended up being impossible to get, I could just have my lawyer recount all the efforts taken to kind of provide an excuse for letting me move forward without that particular piece of paper. However, the story that came out of that was just so bizarre and weird, I thought I’d just lose credibility. I mean, a lawyer writing a letter saying that there is not a German consulate employee in the United States who knows how to get a criminal background check and all the bizarre, nonfunctional processes that we were being subjected to, well, the Jewish Agency just wouldn’t believe me.
Now, on that note, once I had gotten my original slate of documents done and handed to the Jewish agency, I moved out of my apartment in Los Angeles and went back to mom. I was going to need to save up some money, and LA was expensive. I thought I’d only be back at mom’s for maximum a couple of months before heading off to Israel. And I missed my daughter Alia, my one and true and only friend on earth always and forever after from the beginning to the end of all things.
Things began to take longer than I thought, however, and during the process of handing in my packet, and as I was starting to have to deal with the stress of the German background check, I got the idea that I needed to get out of mom’s place and go do a bike tour. 2023 being one of the worst years of my life had taken a bit of a toll on me, and I didn’t want to go off on some grand adventure with a gigantic tour at this time. I thought I would just hand in this background check and then head out for a little tour of Greece and Cyprus while waiting for the Jewish Agency to process things, and then once I got the thumbs up to enter Israel I’d just take a quick $100, 20-minute flight from Cyprus to Ben Gurion Airport.
So it was after being driven crazy with all of these strange difficulties yet again, plus my time at mom’s was waxing long and uncomfortable, and having been ideating about a nice, short, small, easy little bicycle trip around Greece, that I decided, you know, heck, it looks like I am just going to have to add Bonn to my itinerary and go pick up this background check in person. I got the idea that I would get it back to the Jewish Agency in the USA somehow and then just head down to Greece and pick up with the aforementioned bicycle plan. So the idea of a short Greece tour before Israel morphed into a Germany to Greece tour.
Now, if you remember from the cross-country bus trip, I was recently in a near plane crash. Not only that, but in December I went down to Guadalajara to try to help mom with her apartment down there. On the flight back, the cabin lost power. So two out of the last three flights I have been on have had serious problems. Add to that, December of 2024 and January 2025 had more plane crashes in the news than in 2023 and the rest of 2024 combined. There was a plane hitting a helicopter in Washington DC, the plane crash in Korea that killed 200 people, a crash involving a plane landing and then flipping over, and, well, plane crashes were everywhere in the news at that time.
Now I am not going to say I have developed a fear of flying. That just can’t happen. A guy who travels like I do just has to fly. And one of my military benefits is that I can hop on US Air Force Air Mobility Command flights and basically fly on Air Force cargo planes from base to base all over the world for free. So I am going to fly, even if I gotta go to therapy, use tranquilizers, I dunno, I am gonna figure out how to fly, but right now, I just have this idea that there is something going on in the stars, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to get on a plane. Maybe the Illuminati Satanists that I often complain about in my writings are using their black magic to keep me from being comfortable with flying. I dunno. I’ll try some short flights like the one from Cyprus to Israel and see how things go, but if I end up having an anxiety attack on an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic, well, eight-hour anxiety reactions can cause strokes, embolisms, aneurisms, etc. Bad juju. I just don’t want to get on a plane at the moment. I am a PTSD vet. PTSD is at essence an anxiety condition.
So I booked a cruise. However, the only cruise I could get at a decent price point at this time of year was from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to South Hampton, England. So then, the bicycle trip is now South Hampton > Bonn > Cyprus > Israel.
Now I have three big bike trips that I would like to accomplish in life if I have the opportunity. I would absolutely love to do a Southeast Asia Vietnam/Thailand type tour. The biggest and most challenging one, though, would be the South America/Antarctica/Australia tour. If I can do that one I will have been to all of the continents. And the other is a Northern European Tour. Now that tour would have some difficulties because it would be too cold to do a lot of types of riding in the winter, and a summer tour would involve crowds, expensive hotels, etc. So the northern European tour hasn’t been done yet because it is just difficult to arrange.
However, this tour seems like it is being forced upon me. Or maybe I could say that this tour is being built for me to go on right now. I can’t say I am disappointed. I kind of need to finish rebuilding. That is, while 2023 was easily within the top five worst years of my life, 2024 was pretty decent. It really wasn’t a fantastically awesome year, as it should have been living in Hollywood and riding my bicycle around the most incredible part of the country with the best cycling groups in the world. I’ll always treasure the days with Dave Mitchell and the Palos Verdes Rapha Cycling Club riders, and I had some spectacular rides with the Humble and Kind riding club in Pasadena and East Hollywood, to include getting to ride with Juli, this utterly and absolutely amazingly impressive woman I had the chance to hang out with then. She is in no way any kind of romantic interest, though she is quite beautiful. However, she is in her twenties and devoted dearly to her boyfriend. How she treated him is an important part of what impressed me so powerfully about her actually.
And then I got into my Koreatown synagogue where I was treated so incredibly wonderfully by Brad and Merle and Rabbi Susan and many others. So yeah, 2024 wasn’t the best of years because all the while I knew I would be leaving, and I wouldn’t be able to take these people with me, but it was a year of getting myself back together after 2023 in a pretty good environment. All of that just about came crashing down, though, when I went down to Mexico in December of 2024 to help my mother with her apartment there and had such a miserable experience, I just don’t know if I will ever be able to describe it. Looking back, I see it as a kind of another hit job from the forces of darkness aimed at just taking me out of this fight we call life on earth once and for all.
So being a bit fragile after a year of recovery, and then getting slammed like that, coming back up to Phoenix from Guadalajara, I just couldn’t sit there in mom’s spare bedroom forever messing around with German consulates and immigration lawyers for months on end until I was ready to hang myself from the ceiling fan. I had to get out of dodge, and I have to go on this bike tour that seems to have been made for me, forced upon me by God Above. I’m touring Northern Europe in Early Spring, like it or not.
But that’s not all. Yeah, I’m cruising from Fort Lauderdale, but I’m in the Southwest, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Well, my stepdad was wanting to road trip from Scottsdale to the Texas coast to do some stuff with his house in Rockport, so I was able to hitch a ride with him as far as San Antonio, where I caught an Amtrak to New Orleans. I arrived there just a few hours after the Eagles crushed the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
From there, though, I had problems with planes, trains, and automobiles. There isn’t a really good Amtrak route from Texas to Florida, and normally getting from west to east involves a trip to New York or DC or somewhere and traveling down the eastern seaboard to South Florida, but I just couldn’t catch a train. Amtrak told me they had absolutely no trains on that route for the months of February and March due to some construction. That was a weird conversation, like the lady on the phone was having all kinds of computer problems, couldn’t get any routes to pop up, and then flat out told me “you just can’t get there from here.”
So I decided to ride across Florida. New Orleans > Tallahassee > St Augustine > Fort Lauderdale, with a number of interesting points along the way. So with this absolutely delightful Florida ride also forced up on me, it’s looking like the Big Guy is intent on this ride being even bigger and more epic than the 2022-2023 Southern Europe tour from Lisbon to Israel that ended in failure in Amman, Jordan.
And with that, well, you know, in religion there is the phenomenon of the mission that gets accomplished in two parts. The mythic Japanese Emperor Jimmu failed in his first attempt to conquest Yamato, but he was successful the second time. The Chinese hero Gun failed to stop the great flood, but his son Yu succeeded. In the Vedas, Indra fails to slay the Dragon Vitra until he tries a second time with “Ultimate Thunder” which he took from the bones of a wise sage. The Greeks talk of Hercules failing to kill the Hydra until he comes back a second time with a plan to cauterize the regenerating heads. Of course in the Bible we have King David forced to defend the kingdom not from the throne, but while being hunted by King Saul. It wasn’t until after Saul that he could build the kingdom from the throne. And then finally, there is the second time around that the New Testament says hasn’t happened yet, but will, as there was this Jewish guy who showed up to take his throne and ended up dead on a cross, but they say he is on the way back to take care of things the second time around.
And currently, and this will be a charged issue because it is deeply divisive political, but like it or not, we have a president who failed in reelection but is once again in the Oval Office. Now that idea probably makes a lot of people I’ve been hanging around with for the last couple of years sick to their stomach, but for better or for worse, it just looks to me like it’s a season for “the second time around.” In terms of my travels to the Holy Land, it seems that, completely independently of my intentions and planning, a kind of a “second coming” is being built for me to participate in.
So okay, since this initial explanation of what the heck I am doing on the bike this year has turned out to be so long, maybe there’s hope for me to make a regular travel blog post after all. I’ll just end this here with a promise to post about this amazing ride I just did across Florida when I can get to it. Now that catastrophe in Mexico was so intense I had to take some time to figure out how to be a human being again, and that has affected my writing. I still owe Zack Snyder a few posts about his movies, and those are going to come. I knew that series was going to be slow coming and interspersed with some other stuff, but I did think I would be finishing it about now. I still have a few more posts to go, however. I really want to get it finished before James Gunn’s Superman movie comes out this Summer, as I do have a mind to see if I can get that little booklet about Man of Steel published that I was writing a couple years back. And now that I’m on tour, my schedule is going to be crazy for a while. But on my last tours I’ve always found ways to get some blogging done on the road.
That said, I hope to do a write up of the Florida ride before too long, and the routes I am planning through Europe look like they are going to be off the chain. So, yeah, more to come. Fingers crossed.
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