Venturing Around Vietnam – Part 2

Hello friends and family! In the past two weeks I travelled to the central Vietnam cities of Hue, Da Nang, and Hoi An. Hue is home to the Imperial Citadel where Vietnam’s last dynasty ruled, and it’s also where I ate the best regional cuisine during the whole trip. Da Nang is rapidly developing into […]

Venturing around Vietnam – part 1

Hello friends and family! Greetings from Vietnam, where I’m spending three weeks before returning to real life (i.e. a job). Since my boyfriend is living in New Zealand now, we decided to meet “halfway” in Hanoi, which we determined was equally inconvenient for both of us. After two whole days of snowstorms, flight delays, missed […]

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 […]

The Casinos and Cathouses of Nevada

Greetings from the frontier! Americans like to complain that they aren’t free anymore, but Nevada is as libertarian as it gets: cheap booze, legal weed, roadside brothels, indoor smoking, no mask mandates, sky-high speed limits, and gun-friendly businesses. You can even gamble in grocery stores, laundromats and gas stations, playing their “loose” and “liberal” slots. […]

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 […]