A Softer Side of Florida Man

Hello friends and family! Since my last post, I’ve been bouncing around Florida in the hopes of experiencing as much as possible before I have to head north for Christmas. I went to the Everglades and saw huge alligators sunning themselves in drainage ditches, and then drove through the Florida Keys until I reached the […]

Locals and Outsiders in the Outer Banks

Hello friends and family! Driving across North Carolina from Appalachia in the west to the Atlantic Ocean in the east is like travelling in a wormhole backwards through time. The further east you go, the further south you get. People have stronger accents and drink weaker beer. Men smoke inside their cars, the windows rolled […]

Hell is a Family Vacation in Pigeon Forge

Hello friends and family! Nothing brings Americans together like fall colours. In the woods of Maine, Vermont, Appalachia, California, Idaho, and wherever else a stand of deciduous trees grows, you’ll find a gaggle of Americans gawking at the foliage. The parking lots are full of pick-up trucks with gun racks and Subarus with kayak racks, […]

A Loner’s Guide to Prince Edward County

Hello friends and family! I’m a bit of an open wound, I realize. Living in a van means the barrier between myself and the wider world is very thin – just a sheet of metal, a half-inch of insulation, and a quarter-inch of plywood. When it’s cold out, I am cold. When it’s hot out, […]

Wagons Across Wyoming

Hello friends and family! This (admittedly overdue) blog post really starts a few weeks ago in Elko, Nevada. I’d stopped off to gamble in a smoky casino and eat a pasty, the Cornish hand-pie beloved by coal miners, and then decided to visit a museum about the migrations of the mid-1800s that brought successive waves […]

American Credulity

Hello friends and family! I was listening to the book Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen the other day, which is about the history of the American penchant for the fantastical and untrue, beginning with the very first pilgrims and fortune-seekers who settled Virginia and New England in the 1600s. Most of these settlers were wide-eyed naïfs […]

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 […]