Update: Saturday 25 October 2008. Finally arrived in New York City.

Details on blog: http://ctbgscrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Update; Monday 13 October from St Joseph, Missouri ... Thanks to everyone for getting us closer to the target ... For updates on our progress, please go to our Tour Blog at

http://ctbgscrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Update: Tues 7 Oct: we're now at Lamar, Colorado about to move into Kansas tomorrow...

Hi, and thank you for visiting this fundraising page!

Building Futures is an initiative created by Study Group in 2005 following the Asian Tsunami disaster. It was decided to raise money in order to help the reconstruction of badly affected communities and in particular to help rebuild the lives of children who had lost their homes and families and were left with little or no access to education. A first school was built in Saney in the Aceh district of Indonesia and since then as we widened the scope of the program a further 2 schools have been built in Zounzounkanme, Benin and in Codo Nova, Brazil.

The current vision for Building Futures is to provide a long term, sustainable commitment to educational projects in the world's poorest regions through the building of schools, provision of educational materials and training of teachers.

Study Group has partnered with Plan International to realise these goals. Funds raised through this page will go towards our next project of building a school in the Sichuan Province of China that was devastated in the recent earthquake, to help children in desperate circumstances build a better future.

Having spent almost all of my career in international education I am very keen to support and promote this program. In order to draw your attention to this extremely worthy cause and give some focus to this fundraising campaign, I thought I would take the extraordinary liberty of telling you about my forthcoming holiday...

I am taking a month out to cycle across the USA.

Why? is the question that I'm sensing you need answered. Well, I have this insanely optimistic (or just plain insane) friend who suggested it some time ago. After saying "no that would be remarkably silly" many times, I was caught earlier this year one evening after drinking and with my judgement significantly impaired I agreed that it "might be quite a good idea". Futile backtracking followed and I still felt confident that I wouldn't get enough time off work. Not so (thanks Sean), and with a month off booked I had no cards left to play. So I apprehensively made my way to the local bike shop, bought a shiny new push iron and started racking up a few laps of Central Park. If, like me, you haven't ridden a bike since schooldays I can tell you that they have moved on a bit but they haven't managed to make saddles any comfier.

My pedalling partner for this daunting debacle is my old friend of some 25 years, Welsh cycling wizard, Paul 'Buggy' Evans. We'll set off from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on Saturday 20 Sept and then just cycle across country heading towards that tall pointy building in Manhattan and we'll see how far we get in 30 days. Buggy is also raising money for a great cause http://www.justgiving.com/sanfrancisconewyork2008

If you're at a desperately loose end in the next few weeks there will be a blog I'll be updating daily (probably) where you can follow our progress and make sure you're getting some good mileage value from us for your donation. And I promise not to make the blog up if we give up in the Rockies and just go to Vegas for 3 weeks. If you want to mentally push us along you can even sponsor per mile, per state or if you're really generous, per burger consumed en route.

It should be quite an adventure and its probably the most over optimistic sporting attempt since Australia unsuccessfully tried to take on England in the last rugby world cup. Over 3000 miles, 3 mountain ranges, a dozen or so states and a bit of desert. I'm excited to see more of this great country I now live in and you never know, I might even be a bit thinner at the end.

And how about this - If you would like to make a donation to 'Building Futures', the really fabulous news is that Study Group (my employer) will match your donation, so your cash will go twice as far!! Yes, its a groovy double bubble situation folks. Get on board...

Thank you in advance for your wonderful support!

Cheers,

CT

P.S. Donating through this website is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to support my fundraising efforts.

Many thanks for your support -- and don't forget to forward this to anyone who you think might want to donate too!