Day 374 / 139

Date: 21 April 2023
Sleeping location: N/A
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 26 / 23552 / 8715
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 200 / 224400 / 106400
Literal metaphor of the day: blood, sweat and tears
Day in two words: The end*

The morning provided a beautiful view all around the bay, low cloud over the mountains of two days ago and the sun peeking through. I had such a confusing swirl of emotions over breakfast. Is it an anticlimax? I had always been certain that I'd do it, so there's no jeopardy. No final push, because there are no time constraints. All of the drama and difficulty has come already. There's nothing to beat here, no clock, nobody else, just a casual 25km cycle on smooth tarmac on a relatively light bike with nice weather. It felt wrong. 

We rode along the beautiful quiet coastline and talked about the penguins. A couple of local riders came past and I chatted to one for a bit on a climb. It still felt wrong. He told me about a nice place to get scones nearby. What on earth did scones have to do with this moment. We paid what I think was a vast amount to go into the Cape Peninsula reserve and left most of our bags behind at the gate. This was wrong, it was too easy. 

Then over the top of the main climb of the day I briefly put my feet through the pedals and suddenly it felt right. I kept going, and right then I realised that I had to sprint my way to the end, 10km away, and I had to arrive on my own, and I couldn’t drop back to tell my dad (sorry dad**) because then it would be a plan and it couldn’t be a plan, it had to be spontaneous. As I kept the pace going it really started to feel right, and the enormity of everything hit me like a ton of bricks, the emotion started to build up and I started to cry. I don't even know which emotion it was, probably all of them. Even if this had “just” been a bike ride it would have been a big deal, the biggest and hardest bike ride of my life, but it wasn't just a bike ride, it was also a pandemic and the life and death of a relationship and the thousands of people I met along the way. 

I kept going, even though my legs were burning and my breaths were getting ragged, and I realised that it was right because it was hard, like so much of the journey had been, and forcing myself into the difficult approach was what I’d been consistently doing to get myself to this point. I rounded a corner and saw a headland, the end of the road, and I started to cry harder until I realised that this wasn’t actually the Cape of Good Hope, it was just some random headland and I was about 5km too early, and then I laughed and cried at the same time for a bit. A couple of stupid budget hire cars overtook me and than drove at the same speed as me, forcing me back into reality and away from my feelings, and for a few minutes I was worried that the whole thing would be ruined by a Toyota Starlet or a Honda Enthusiasm or some shit, but thankfully they went straight at the turnoff and I went right, down to the Cape, and I could fully focus on the last few km and the end of the road, the end of the land, the end of the last five years of my life.

Unfortunately the car park was half full of tourists taking jolly pictures by the signs, so I pulled up, kept my head down, picked up Maggie and practically ran to a rock facing the sea (and, importantly, no tourists) where I sat Maggie and myself down and let the moment fully hit me, and then I properly cried, huge sobs and tears, and the tears mixed with my sweat so my face was just a big puddle of salty water, and somehow I had cut myself and the blood was pouring down my shin and I didn’t care, I just sat crying and staring over the rocks to the sea, Maggie by my side like she always had been. 

 

The title of this blog is kind of a joke, but this really has been Maggie’s journey as well. I had different riding companions, different bags and kit and clothes and components. The only constants were me and Maggie.*** She never truly failed me, rarely let me down, just carried me and all of my stuff over every kind of terrain I could throw at her. If it’s possible to love an inanimate object I love this inanimate object, albeit not so much that I would marry her like those people you sometimes see in documentaries on Channel 5. 

After several minutes I finally came out of my thoughts and was surprised to see an ostrich only a few metres away. I'd had such tunnel vision on the way in that I'd missed three of them wandering around the car park. In hindsight this was definitely the right place to end my journey; a wild rocky coast with seals, birds huge and small, waves crashing on the shore, and not just some arbitrary end point in the middle of a busy city. Dad rolled in about ten minutes later, straight past an ostrich which only decided at the last second to get out of the way, and we had a hug to celebrate the end of both of our journeys. And that was that. We went for a walk around the peninsula, and it was very beautiful and I sort of felt like I was in this dreamlike state, and I went to a gift shop and bought some tat to remember the occasion, and then we got back on the bikes and began to cycle our way back towards Cape Town. And obviously that’s a story, and I’ll make more stories with Maggie, but they aren’t part of this story, because this story ended down by the rough sea with tourists about, just like it started, but three years and nine months and 23,552km later. As I got back on Maggie I thought: this is the first pedal stroke of the rest of my life. 

*I looked back to see what I put here for the first day: “Let’s do this”. From where I stand now this seems astonishingly light. As does something I said in the blog that day: “It’s kind of obvious but this is how it’s going to be; months and months of nice days that aren’t epic in their own right, but become something epic when added together.” NICE DAYS. I didn’t have a fucking clue.

**He understood, or at least he was very nice about it if he didn’t

***And Yoshi, to be fair to him, but he didn’t do much other than “vibes”