#1689 Nat and Mikey Survived!

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Clay interviews the adventurous Brits Nat and Mikey, school teachers who got it into their heads to float the entire Missouri and Mississippi River corridor. They began on August 5, 2025, and completed their journey in the second week of January 2026. They floated more than 3,000 miles from Three Forks, Montana, to the Gulf of Mexico, where they pulled their canoe out of the water for the last time. When Clay caught up with them in mid-January, they were luxuriating in a New Orleans hotel. But the big news is that Nat and Mikey's great adventure is not over! They are now going to hitchhike to California, then fly to South America for further exploration. Towards the end of the podcast, they tried Velveeta for the first time, with the usual British condescension towards one of America's great food groups. This episode was recorded on January 18, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson.
0:08.5	I'm actually in a motel room in Missoula, Montana. I'm talking with our adventurers, Matt and
0:14.2	Mikey of Great Britain, who I think have done it. You now are in a hotel room in New Orleans.
0:19.2	That is correct. Yeah. Do you finally believe
0:21.9	that we're going to make it? Well, have you touched base with the Gulf of Mexico? Yes. Yes. Yeah,
0:27.3	we put our foot in the Gulf and now we're in New Orleans and our plan is go no further.
0:32.5	So all of my predictions that this would miscarry in some comic or tragic way have proved to be erroneous.
0:39.0	Yeah, I think that's fair. I think there was comedy and there was tragedy all in a way that
0:45.2	allowed us to get to where we needed to go. You are schoolteachers from Great Britain who
0:50.6	had this madcap idea of flying to Denver, hitchhiking to Bozeman, buying a canoe,
0:56.7	and floating the Missouri and then the Mississippi all the way to slackwater. And you did it.
1:01.8	How many miles did this amount to? Three and a half thousand, I think, about that.
1:06.8	You're in a half thousand miles. And you started on what date?
1:09.9	Obviously, no one knows what three and a half thousand miles is. So it's about the same as the
1:14.6	width of the United States, I think. In fact, it's a little bit more. Is it? Yeah.
1:18.6	Yeah, we started on the 5th of August. It's absolutely an amazing achievement. I just looked
1:25.2	it up to the longest river in England is the Severn, 230 miles.
1:30.0	What? We were wondering about that. We were thinking, oh, if we wanted to do a source to see in
1:34.0	England. But still, that's nothing. That's like a Saturday for the two of you.
1:38.0	Exactly. Yeah. If you traveled three and a half thousand miles from England, you would be
1:43.1	somewhere in the middle of Turkey,
1:45.1	I think.
	...

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