Goodness that’s bad, I’ve got to think of some better blog-post titles otherwise any sympathy I may be currently be getting will be eradicated faster than it takes someone to smash a car window if I keep turning out puns like that.

I’m in Raleigh now, in North Carolina. I almost quit and went straight back to Charleston from Greensboro yesterday, but when I saw how everyone had rallied round and support came flooding in for me it soon became clear that I should not give up and and carry on. And even though at the very least I wanted to head back to Chucktown immediately and lick my wounds to recover, I realised my resolve and thus I’ve got to and visit a same-named-underground-stop place down near Wilmington, NC by the end of today (even though I don’t have a camera to take a picture of it!), and then I’ll head back to Charleston for the weekend.

Then, on Sunday - July 5th - it’s time to crack on properly and go for another eight weeks to cover the remaining 35 states that I have yet to touch. So if you’ve just joined on board the Geofftech bandwagon and are thinking “Ok Geoff, enough with the pity posts, let’s see some of America that you promised us”, then the journey will pick up again after the weekend, through until the end of August - so stick around.

I was also somewhat embarrassed, certainly humbled to the extreme when I spoke to my man Ken at TheDigitel yesterday and found out that the various help Geoff pages that were spawned off of Mondays events has got me around $4000 in donation money from people - which is just staggering. And I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to say ‘thank you’ enough to all and anyone who contributed to that amount.

But if you did, then thank you. And if you messaged me, txt’d me, facebook’d me, emailed me - anything and I haven’t got back to you yet, please be aware that I did get and read your message, and I’ve just been a little overwhelmed to be able to respond to all of them yet.

I’d like to point out my progress map this morning, which is over there at all times in the right hand column of the blog, but I’ll show here in a bigger format. I really have been updating it every day at the end of the day to show the ’same name’ places I’ve been to, where I’ve stayed the night and the gas stops I’ve made & other bits too. And it gets more interesting now as the states get bigger, and the driving distances get longer, and it tests my resolve more.

Don’t forget too, that my twitter feed probably “tells the story best of all”, (as one person put it), and I’ll often say exactly where I am, or what I’m doing, or observing on all the quirky stuff that I see along the way. If you hop onto the Facebook group too (and you don’t have to even be my facebook friend to see/join it) there’s a whole bunch of additional photos there that I’ve been uploading as I go.

I am now scared that the car will get broken into again. When I came out of my friends house this morning, I looked on the driveway and car was gone. Stolen! Oh… oh.. no it wasn’t, it just was just parked 10 yards further down the drive than I’d remembered, momentarily out of sight. But that’s what it does to you … every moment you think now that something bad is happening to it.

We got talking to other residents in the Greensboro neighbourhood yesterday where we were staying. Turns out that a few other cars had been broken into in the last few weeks - it wasn’t an isolated incident. A girl in a car who was driving by and stopped and talk to us, told us that she had gone out “And bought herself a 9mm because of it”. And what was really shocking is that my reaction wasn’t one of “A Gun! My goodness, a GUN!” like it might have been a while ago - instead I just duly nodded and said “Uh hu”, and understood completely where she was coming from.

Final plug : For the autoglass shop where I got my windows repaired yesterday. They had a copy of the News & Record in their shop, and when I pointed out the article of me in it and what had happened to me, I instantly got a discount on the repair, love it. Maybe Greensboro ain’t so bad after all, even the Mayor got in touch to express her condolences.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under General, Underground : USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Share this post on Facebook