I’d like to tell you about a book I just read. It’s about the Thousand Islands. In the 1950’s, an American writer called John Keats bought a small island in the St. Lawrence River. He got it from his brother-in-law, a stockbroker who had purchased the land for the three vintage boats that came with it. Keats was just a journalist, he couldn’t afford a faraway island with a run down boathouse and...
I shared a video with you in my last blog, where I got together with an old childhood friend to search for a campsite we’d set up 27 years before. I hope it brought to mind some of your own childhood adventures and memories, and that you spent a couple days taking a mental journey through the hazy summers of your youth. But I’m not quite finished taking you down Memory Lane… We didn’t just search...
I found one of my old campsites this summer… nearly 27 years later. In a recent blog, I talked about exploring old haunts in my hometown region with my friend Rob Wilson. Rob was my partner in crime for many teenage exploits. And when we weren’t pulling pranks or getting in trouble at school, we took to the woods near his home on Buckwheat Road, or we borrowed a canoe from my father’s friend Lee...
I visited the public library in my hometown over the Christmas holidays. I hadn’t been back in about 15 years. The children’s section was just as I remembered it. But the rest had changed dramatically. The building finally got a much needed renovation and expansion, and the adult section I browsed in for so many years has been transformed into offices and a comfortable, quiet reading area. The...
My proudest high school moment wasn’t an academic or sporting achievement. I failed several classes and I was never part of a team. No, my proudest achievement was a food fight. The biggest food fight in the history of my school. I wonder how many of my friends knew that me and Jim started the whole thing? There were a lot of small skirmishes leading up to it, of course. Low level food fights...
It’s the Victoria Day long weekend in Canada. For most people, that means the start of summer: barbecue season, cottage parties and beer (it’s not called “May Two-Four” for nothing…). But for me, this weekend is always a time of remembrance. The May long weekend was the time of our annual fishing trip to Dalhousie Lake. A cabin in the woods with no television or telephone, no running water...
I’ve got “top ten” lists on the brain these days… I thought it’d be fun to dredge through the foggy corners of my memory, brush aside the cobwebs, and post a list of my top 10 favourite cities, taken from 25 years of travel. Number One aside, I didn’t post this list in any particular order. Each place is unique and has some individual character that can’t be compared with the others...
I was digging through my files the other day, looking for the seeds of a new blog story, when I came across my first magazine assignment. I had just sold a major feature to Outpost on an expedition I’d done in the Taklamakan Desert. The story was getting good feedback, and when an opening came they asked me to travel on assignment to South Dakota with photographer Jason George. I was...