The Brown Bits of the Map

Hello friends and family! If you open Google Maps and zoom out on the map of California, you’ll see the southern part of the state is divided into two halves: the green and the brown. The green covers the coastal cities and the forests of the mountain ranges that hem those cities in. I am […]

How To Avoid Being Featured on a True Crime Podcast

Hello friends and family! Greetings from California, where I’ve been sight-seeing in Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, the Salton Sea and Anza-Borrego State Park. These are magical places that I’m probably going to write about in my next blog post, but not today. Today I’m on another tangent, one that is probably only of interest to […]

Passing Time in the Desert

Hello, friends and family! They say Phoenix is one of the fastest growing municipalities in America. It sprawls in walled subdivisions out into the far reaches of the desert, and its gated neighbourhoods have lawns so green and canals so dry it makes me want to puke. But the rest of the Arizona desert is […]

Taking it Slow Along Route 66

I rolled into Phoenix a while back, where the low desert heat was at first a balm and then a bother. To escape I loaded up the van and grabbed my new beau and made the requisite Grand Canyon visit. I’ll give the requisite stipulation that it’s far too magnificent to put into words, and […]

The Ghosts of New Mexico

Hello friends and family! I am back in the true Southwest, the nexus of magic and mystery, a place where the land is too big for words and too deep for comprehension. As soon as I drove into northern New Mexico from the Texas Panhandle a few weeks ago I immediately recognized the smell of […]

The Friends You Make Along the Way

Hello friends and family! The past few weeks I’ve been meandering through Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. These are states with poor, rural populations that live alongside small highways or tucked away up in the woods, the dirt roads bleeding red clay after the rains. What else can I say that I haven’t already? The […]

West Virginia Is An Actual Place

Hello friends and family! Greetings from West Virginia, a state so overlooked you might have thought it was merely a semi-autonomous offshoot of regular Virginia. I’ve spent the past week and a half exploring the southern edge of West Virginia, particularly the Monongahela National Forest, the Alleghany Mountains, and America’s newest National Park, the New […]

Leaf Peeping in new england

Hello friends and family! It’s been a while! I took a hiatus from this blog over the summer while I settled down for three months in Minden, working at an LCBO. It was good fun, but I got restless to be back out on the road. I don’t really know why. Last year it was […]

At Home in Algonquin

Hello friends and family! Ah, May in Algonquin! The blackflies aren’t yet awake and the hordes of May long-weekend revelers haven’t yet arrived. The woods are blanketed in the blossoms of trout lillies and red trilliums, which will die as soon as the sugar maple leaves bloom. The fiddleheads are emerging. The salamander tadpoles are […]

Springtime Along the Bruce

I never write lovingly about the places I come from. Travel and adventure writing is always based on paying attention to the new places we go to, never the old places we come from. But sometimes it can be refreshing to write about our places of origin as if we were seeing them with the […]