By noon on the last day of August, eight weeks after I’d set off from the Atlantic coast, the sizeable town of Bend, Oregon, lay in sight: just west of it my map’s base layer turned from sandy beige to forest green, and thence to ocean blue. I’d never managed more than 250 miles in a day before, but this was surely the day to do it.

Come sunset I’d have my front wheels in the Pacific. Hollow disbelief set in. I had somehow traversed this giant nation from sea to shining sea, up to the Canadian border, down to the Gulf of Mexico, over the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide, and I had done it in a 93-year-old car christened Mike with a lawnmower carburettor.

Except I hadn’t, because two miles outside Bend, the crankshaft broke.

‘Now there’s one club you don’t want to join, Teeum, and that’s the two-piece crank club.’ Every T guy I’d met had spoken of this mother of all breakdowns, sometimes in a tone of jaunty bravado, more often with murmured dread. A bust crankshaft was a game-over grand slam, the Component Failure That Must Not Be Named. The crank converts up-and-down piston movement into a more useful rotational force, a procedure that requires an eccentrically crenellated metal casting of obvious vulnerability.