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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K.Chesterton On Thursday I flew to Wellington (NZ) for work, as I sometimes do. The airport is notorious; the […]
Jill's Scene 
The korero