LHR to YYZ

Hello Everyone!

I’ve started to write this blog to keep everyone up to date on my whereabouts. For some of you this might come as a surprise but I’ve left the UK. Sorry I didn’t say good-bye to so many of you but it’s always easier to sneak out the back door then leave through the front. I’ve dropped off the radar in the past couple of months trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life. Stay in London, move to LA, become Born Again, start a rock band, the possibilities were endless. So I finally made up my mind. Unfortunately all of the good band names were taken so LA it was then.

I’ve been getting a few emails from friends trying to figure out where I am and what better way to let people know where I am and what I’m doing then to provide them with a map. This blog is easier then sending everyone the same set of messages and I’ll be able to put some interesting pictures online so you really don’t have to read the long tedious emails that I know you’ll just filter into your trash anyway.

Eight years ago on the eve of the 2000 American Presidential election and with several fortifying martinis flowing sluggishly through me I said to myself “If that madman gets elected I’m leaving the country.” And while I awoke the next morning to a well deserved hangover so too was the rest of the country beginning to experience a headache that would last for the next eight years. What I said in jest turned out to be a reality. Not because of the outcome of a stolen election or for a halfwit in the White House even though it was as good an excuse as any, I ended up moving to the UK.

Eight years on and I’m back. Having finally mastered the art of enjoying a warm beer on cold summer night I’m returning to America anxious to share my stories with people who still believe the war in Iraq is really about WMDS , Fighting the War on Terror, Liberating the Iraqi People, a great excuse to buy a new SUV. But I’m being cautious, slowly acclimatizing myself so that America doesn’t come as too much of a shock to my system.

So I’m starting in America Light.

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Canada.

I arrived in Toronto last Friday to meet up with Tash. At the airport I was having second thoughts and not because I was leaving London and starting a new life but thinking perhaps I should have waited till after the election. But as I write this sitting in Tash’s apartment watching CNN, I’m feeling relieved about my decision. Jesse Jackson is having his moment in the limelight, breaking down in tears while Obama gives his victory speech, possibly recounting his desire for a small souvenir from the President Elect when he said I wanna cut his nuts off. The skeptical side of me believes he’s crying because he’s thinking it should be me up there dammit!

So with the election in the bag, it seems that it’s safe to return to the land that brought you Super Sizing and drive-thru Starbucks. My journey begins in Canada, America’s Hat so to speak. After a brief respite in the Great White North, the next part of my trip takes me to Florida, down to Jamaica, then back to Florida to start a cross country road trip that will finally take us to Los Angeles. Tash and I will be posting stories and pictures of our travels on this blog, so keep on checking back, or subscribe to the RSS feed for more up to the minute action.

And just think in another eight years the tides might yet turn again. I can foresee a time when the scariest phrases in common vernacular are no longer Weapons of Mass Destruction, Global Warming or Financial Crisis but instead replaced by only two words…

President Palin

As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where…where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. –Sarah Palin, explaining why Alaska’s proximity to Russia gives her foreign policy experience, interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, Sept. 24, 2008