Jacksonville, Florida

Distance: 3,200 miles

Climbed: 33,000 feet

When you’re waiting in the airport departure area and Clyde The Glide” Drexler sits down next to you, it can only be a favorable augury. And, it was. Today, went as smoothly as a Drexler finger roll. For starters, Continental Airlines accepted my bike and gear with only an additional $100 charge. More importantly, my concerns about mishandling of my bike by baggage handlers and T.S.A. proved unfounded.

On a related, (but not really) note, the Continental crew actively enforced the limitations on “carry on” luggage. In my last decade of flying, I’ve never seen an airline actually require passengers to place their baggage in the test container prior to boarding. The new increased fees for baggage create a strong incentive for passengers to bring even more on board. So, hopefully, other airlines will do the same as Continental.

While en route, I did a back of the coaster calculation (I should note that it took several beers for me to obtain the requisite number of coasters for this exacting computation). It looks like for each hour of air travel, I will be riding 10-12 days. This country is much larger than it appears on the map.

I assembled the bike, racks and panniers in my hotel room while wolfing down a large pizza. Hopefully, it will be enough to feed the mitochondria for tomorrow’s ride.