Adventures of a Kiwi AFS exchange student. I knew from the tele that school in 1975 America was different from school in New Zealand. But there’s nothing like being there, living it, to bring those differences home. I left New Zealand, swearing that at school in America I’d […]
I picked the wrong winner. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves didn’t win the Man Booker. The good news is that for the second year in a row the prize has come down here, to the bottom of the world. New Zealand’s very own Eleanor Catton won in […]
During the summer of ’75 my AFS host family showed me around Minnesota. One memorable trip was to Itasca State Park and the source of the Mississippi River. Mississippi was famous to me as the word guaranteed to trip you up in any spelling test until you remembered […]
I like to travel. I like to come home with photographs. In recent years I’ve used my iPhone. For a point and shoot camera it’s not too shabby at all. But when I found myself, iPhone in hand, stalking a butterfly near Kanchanburi, I knew my phone camera […]
“The open road speaks for a perpetual becoming.” Pico Iyer I’m continuing my tradition of reading well-known books years after they came to the attention of the rest of the world! But the gap is narrowing. Pico Iyer’s The Open Road was published six years ago, where […]
Come with me down memory lane. I want to show you Breckenridge, Minnesota, my hometown while I was an exchange student during the 1975 -76 school year. These photos, except for one, were taken when I visited in 2006. Breckenridge sits at the junction of the Otter Tail and Bois […]
My poppies are in flower. My quince tree is at bud burst. The sap is rising, spring is on its way and my thoughts are turning to travel adventures. Okay, okay, if the posts on this blog are anything to go by that’s not exactly new. Through […]
Suzanne Lenglen, from France, was a world class tennis player almost a hundred years ago. Never heard of her? Me neither. Not until I was researching this post. It turns out she and I have a lot in common. (Note to my kids: if you’re reading this – […]
“The beauty of travel, as of love or terror, is that it regularly turns all your ideas on your head and reminds you that you really know nothing at all.” Pico Iyer I’m used to a land crunched up on itself. The force of two tectonic plates grinding together […]
I saw my first real hand gun in Chicago. It was 1975 and I was on my way to Minnesota. I was edgy. Back home, I’d seen Starsky and Hutch on the Tele – if there was a gun someone always used it and someone always got hurt. The […]
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