My body is a machine!
All rods and ribs. All torque and tongue.
My body is a machine!
All guts and gauges. All pistons and personality.
My body is a machine!
A well-used, poorly-maintained, 26-year-old machine limping across the starting line of the adventure that is today.

I treat my body like I treat my car.
With great enthusiasm, and very little understanding.
I treat my body like I treat my car.
With horrendous abuse, and great expectations of survival.
Brand new I came with parts missing, barely off the showroom floor I was all bursting valves and return trips to the mechanic.
After 10 years and many thousands of kilometres on the clock I had sustained a decent amount of front end damage experimenting with tasks I wasn’t designed for, couldn’t complete and would go on to attempt again and again for years on end.
After 20 years the damage had only continued, but if the cracks and scars, the leaks and smoke have left me with nothing but a well-weathered patina at least I know I still look good in the right light.
And the intervening six years have brought me here, physically comparing myself to my Chevy Astro Van.

While she waits on a spare wheel that isn’t rusted to her undercarriage and a coolant line inbound from Alberta, I patiently and routinely swallow penicillin to defeat a bout of strep throat, moving gingerly from the couch to the fridge hoping to find something that will provide some nutrients to ease joints and muscles aching from a dehydrated and malnourished week in bed.
Sometimes I envy machines – sentience is such a burden.
It was my choice to surf Canadian waters last Monday morning despite the early signs of a sore throat, and then to attempt to drink away said sore throat with Tofino Brewing Company’s excellent Kettle Sour ale on Monday afternoon.
It was my choice to take 4000mg of ibuprofen in 24 hours on Wednesday after I hadn’t managed to use a bout of gastro to shit and/or vomit the other sickness out of my system, which resulted in a wildly attractive rash on my torso and arms.
So on Friday afternoon with a fever approaching 40ºC and a new found of appreciation of Powerade, I stumbled into the pharmacy for the third time that week to collect a penicillin prescription from my lady surfer Dr Gilbert and the pharmacist had good laugh at me for being a one-man-band of theatrical illnesses.
I like her for that.

There was a point on Wednesday night where I was convinced I must be healthy again because I woke up and went to grab a sip of water and poured the majority down my nose and all of my face/pillow, and began laughing immediately.
In such slumbered confusion I could only laugh. And then vomit profusely.
It’s a brutal realisation that the only occasion you’ve had for laughter in a couple of days also caused you to bring up your dinner of salted crackers, Powerade and lemon ginger tea.
But worse things have happened to better people, and I write none of this for sympathy.
Maybe it’s just self deprecation, self flagellation and a PSA about reading the dosage labels on medicine bottles.
But after a week of missed work Tofino has once again sunk it’s beautiful claws deeper into my wanting skin I am finding it harder to leave this town I came to for two weeks five months ago.
So maybe I will stop making plans.
I will forgo a little sentience and hope my body can simply fire on all cylinders, headed straight on a winding road with someone entertaining riding shotgun and a version of myself carrying a little spontaneity and indifference to the destination at the wheel.

Disclaimer: the following may be dramatised for entertainment purposes, which are different from entertainment porpoises and which I believe Sea World deals in.

I am a juggler; mid throw, slow motion.
This life is a circus and I am a clown, the colourful misrepresentation of much quoted Shakespeare.
In this caricature I envision my face painted, complete with a gaping smile and wide eyes cast upwards as my entire arsenal of juggling paraphernalia is overcome by gravity and their weighted ends are turned back on me.
As my eyes find these tools of entertainment I’ve sent skyward I realise they are knives and axes, flaming torches and hand grenades.
Although I must be the one who has sent these objects skyward I have absolutely no idea how to juggle and I am now caught in a shitstorm of explosives and sharp objects.

Traveling and living overseas is a personal philosophical journey, whether or not that is sought by the traveler.
We travel to experience, to indulge, to learn and to grow.
You surround yourself with new people in new places because your departure point has become stable, and stability is for bridges and people who can deal with responsibility.
And as each of these experiences, indulgences and opportunities to learn and grow present themselves you react accordingly.
And, human as I am, my reaction is often to catch the knife by the handle and the torch by the flame.
So I attempt to fan the flame with the blade of a knife, and forge myself an entirely new ordeal.
And then I wake, sober and wondering where all these cuts and burns came from.

I came to Tofino for two weeks five months ago.
It sucked me in like a black hole and showed me a summer from all points in time and everything I could hope to enjoy and learn from.
In this metaphor I am Matthew McConnaughy with only the most basic understanding of black holes and this town is my Interstellar book case.
And one day here does seem to be a lifetime back home, as a new Prime Minister is sworn in and it seems maybe we’ve gone Back to the Future from 1959 to somewhere nearing October 21, 2015.

At the pub every day people ask me why I am in Tofino, and how I got to Tofino.
Aside from the usual money-grabbing responses re: “to serve lovely people such as yourselves, of course,” my answer is often to look around at the scenery and tell them I came down out of the mountains in search of the ocean.
Because, shit, either tourists love an eloquent server or I am just pretentious.
But although that holds true and having the ocean within pissing distance of my front door is key to my survival, it’s always the people who I am privileged enough to call my friends along the way who keep me from wandering off too soon.

And although this town has had me dancing through the battlegrounds of a personal psychological warfare for those same people, I can still sit here on a fold out couch in the living room of staff accommodation wondering about how goddamn good I’ve had it.
Or maybe I simply dwell on glaring examples of my own failings and indulge in fantasies of inadequacy to have something to write about.
“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering,” said Tom Waits, according to a picture my Dad shared with me on Facebook.

A week ago I went skinny dipping in the Tofino Inlet at around three in the morning.
With every footfall and flailing arm splashing in the shallow waters a flash of coloured phosphorescence would light the gaggle of limbs which were accompanied by shrieks of surprise and delight.
As far as experiences and opportunities go, it started as an innocuous evening that came charging in to my life full of surprise, and in the following week has given me cause to learn and grow.

Maybe I’ve grown, maybe I haven’t learnt a thing.
Maybe I’ve just used it as a catalyst for writing something in an attempt to improve upon the quality of our suffering.
But I know I will continue to throw these dangerous objects in the air, practicing and perfecting my style so that in the future I may catch fewer flames and more handles.

I rock shorts in single digits, and wonder what my life has become.
I grew up living life in front of a fully cranked heater on brisk Queensland mornings.
They were no less than ten degrees in the new money, and they required layers.
Now I rock shorts in single digits, and wonder what everyone on a website on the other side of the world is complaining about.
I sit in the sun drinking beer and stealing wifi from a restaurant that asks me to seek shelter, and my gaze lands upon snow capped mountains.
Winter hits back home, with all the ferocity of a kitten wrapped in cotton balls.
And right there I wanted to write puppy, but any chance for alliteration I will jump at. Jumping around at nothing that means anything, like a six-week-old chocolate fucking labrador.
I rock shorts in single digits, and wonder, while sitting around getting drunk on local ale and stealing wifi, what my life has become.
Perhaps nothing of what it could have been.
But potential can only be attained if matched by ambition and ambition is a fickle beast, stuck in the headlights of a passing parade.
To be fair though, with its bright lights and beautiful people, I fucking love this parade.

As I round the final bend on a year in the Americas and the weather comes full circle, ambition and potential become as relevant to me as the weather.
These are things I think about at the edges of everything else that goes on but nothing worth giving any real consideration to – not just yet.
It’s a brief, a passing, where I stick my head out the window of my existence and throw a jacket in the van just in case a fog rolls in while I surf.
And surfing here is enough of a challenge to relegate any aspirations of the future to the passenger’s seat, along with that seldom worn jacket.
Because I rock shorts in single digits on the beach, and attempt to apply the same foolhardy mentality to the ocean which I enter daily, and which is so changeable on the north west coast of North America that I am never not caught by surprise.

I am surprised as three days of northerly winds can blow in such a change in the ocean’s temperature that I can last only thirty minutes before frozen limbs leave me limping from Long Beach on low tide.
I’m surprised as I have surfed the last month without rubber boots (or party pants) and managed two hour sessions with only a few frozen digits at a time.
(It’s important to note that frozen toes encourages surfing my backhand, which always needs improvement.)
But all in, I’m surprised that two months in I can don the 4/3 and booties and regard it as the most natural way to enter the ocean, impersonating a seal as closely as possible in waters where seals aren’t high on the food chain, and not feel fear.

The pub I work in overlooks water where orcas have been breaching in the last few weeks, and overlooks a marina home to a sealion named Oscar.
The Oregon coastline, only a few hundred clicks to the south, is a great-white-shark breeding ground, and regarded as the source of the cold water currents which make their way north to Vancouver Island.
The nature of this part of the Pacific Ocean is enough to kill any ill equipped human, and given the chance the creatures that dwell therein are certainly adapted to cull any stragglers from the food chain.
But for the same reasons I don’t allow fear to keep from the water in Western Australia, I can pretend to tease the limits of my mortality here on the west coast of North America.

There is a sea lion who knows that each day, as the fishing charter boats return to port, he will be fed.
He’s a massive, cranky old bastard, and he’s known as Oscar.
The fisherman arrive in port and begin gutting and filleting their catch of salmon and halibut, throwing Oscar the remains of fish which sell for upwards of $50 per kilo.
He thrashes his great blubbery body and tosses dead fish through the air.
He pretends to himself that he is the great, natural born predator he would be without human intervention.
This is not a story about Oscar (the sealion).
But it is a story about a man I had in the bar who I’ve given the name of Oscar, because he was a grumpy old bastard with yellow teeth and a nose squashed flat to his face.
Oscar (the sealion) may not be mentioned again. This a story about Oscar (the man).

At 3pm on a Wednesday, Oscar (the man) ordered a pint and a shot of tequila.
Oscar paid cash and did not tip.
Oscar then fed twenty dollars into the tabs lotto, which would win him three dollars which he would celebrate with another pint.
All the while he spoke, or muttered, or grunted occasionally intelligible words which made their escape through a mouth and nose which protruded from his face roughly the same distance.
But his eyes seemed excited, betraying whatever anger he held and telling of an enthusiasm.
For anger, maybe, or sadness.
He fed another twenty dollars in the machine and broke about halfway even, somewhat justifying his excited eyes.

Oscar lived up the way, he gestured, up past the hostel and over looking the bay.
“I was renting a holiday house up that way with some friends when I first got to town,” I told Oscar, for some reason, while pouring another pint and another shot of tequila.
He grunted the name of the family owning the land, and I nodded.
“People staying there have no respect. No respect for the property.
“I had some of them shooting fireworks at my house one night! From the headland, straight at my house!
“I yelled at them to fucking quit it but they kept at it, so I was going to go over there with Louis.”
“Louis?” I asked.
“Louis. The Louisville Slugger. The baseball bat in the closet. Show them what’s what.”
“What good would that have done?” I asked.
“Well, if it was one on one it would have been good fun at least.”
He ordered another pint and an order of hot wings, paid cash and did not tip.

I decided not to tell Oscar (the man) that it would not have been one on one.
He didn’t need to know he would have found over a dozen people, all experiencing a happy delirium and without any inclination to fight or indulge his anger.
I didn’t feel the need to correct him about the trajectory of the fireworks (skyward), if he was able to find some peace in his continuing anger.
He could remain unaware that it was his unassuming bartender and a group of friends, having shared a few tabs of acid, hanging out on the cliff overlooking the sea on the property we had rented, who were letting off fireworks one night for no other reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I felt it was best to let Oscar (the man) tell his story, thrashing his head in his anger and tossing his ill gotten ideas around like a sea lion with an already dead fish.

My song came on the radio as I drove away from the last six months of my life.
It was the morning after the end of season staff party at Revelstoke Mountain Resort, so my decisions were not mine to make, and choosing music to listen to as I drove was beyond me.
So instead of the usual mix of Father John Misty, Kendrick Lamar, #1 Dads, Every Time I Die and Run The Jewels in the recently played music in my iTunes library, the ramblings of the Stoke FM’s morning duo accompanied me into town.
Their mood reflected my own as they spoke of the roller coaster season which had just come to a close with two incredible powder days and boxes of chocolate granola ‘Mojo’ bars; a parting gift from the Resort as skiers exited the gondola for the last time this winter and which now littered the DJ’s studio just as they littered the back of my van.
And as I struggled to keep my eyes on the road and my mind on the many tasks I had ahead of me which would accompany my next great adventure, they played Dashboard by Modest Mouse.

Well we scheme and we scheme but we always blow it
We’ve yet to crash, but we still might as well tow it
Standing at a light switch to each east and west horizon,
Every dawn you’re surprising,
and in the evening one’s consoling
Saying “See it wasn’t quite as bad as”
Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know.

With it’s allusions to the best laid plans failing despite our greatest efforts it was hardly the most auspicious start to this great west coast road trip I have envisioned, but now with over 1000 kilometres under the belts and cogs of Laika the Van, I’m treating it less of an omen of certain failure and more of a warning to exercise caution – and ignoring it entirely.

A careless attitude and enthusiasm for warmer weather in tow, I stowed the essentials of my winter gear in a friend’s basement and made for the aptly named Summerland – where two friends who had made early exits from the Revelstoke season due to injury were living, like myself, in the in-between phases of life.
Having fractured three ribs, two vertebrae and her pelvis rolling an ATV in early March, it was with a flood of relief my Revy housemate Diana greeted me at the door of her parents’ home on both feet and without the aid of a walker when I arrived on Monday evening.
It was her first full day without morphine since the accident and her elfish grin spread ear-to-ear as it always had, and laid to rest any of my lingering worries for her recovery.

With her enthusiasm for life returning to normal as soon as possible, she, Laurel and I took a wine tour of the Okanagan the following day, baulking at the prices of cellar-door cases (minimum $17 per bottle) and club “deals” which afforded the member six bottles of the winemaker’s choice for a mere $150.
Bloody great wine – but coming from Margaret River where you can walk out of the cellar door with a case of 12 decent clean skins for under $100 the pricing didn’t exactly allow for the plans of stocking up on wine for ten people and two weeks in Tofino.

And after 24 hours in Tofino, having burnt through another few hundred clicks on the road, a night in Vancouver and a ferry trip to Van Island, it looks like this tiny, rainy town may be home for the Summer.
Surf shops, cafes, restaurants and beautiful people line the main street and although the surf is blown out and tiny today there is sun and swell in the forecast for the first day of our two week island holiday.
Although the promise of sun is optimistic in one of the rainiest places on the planet, and enthusiasm for surf is daunting given the necessity for a 4mm wetsuit plus hood and booties, with a group of good mates the stoke factor will surely remain on high.

And even if it doesn’t – if the surf doesn’t come and the fish don’t bite; if the rain persists and the sun never shines; if the bars aren’t hiring and Laika the van dies; if I can’t fix her and charm won’t pay parking fines; if my body breaks down and I have to leave this land behind; if I get stuck on a bent of accidentally rhyming the last paragraph of a post – I’ll still have Isaac Brock letting me know that it could have been, would have been worse than I could ever know, the windshield was broken, but I love the fresh air you know.

If you find yourself bent over double, one hand wrapped around the binding of a snowboard buried tail deep in snow to the side of the sub-peak bootpack at Revelstoke Mountain Resort, you and I might have a few things to chat about.
If you’re out of breath because today is Wednesday and on Tuesday night you racked up a bill at the Village Idiot you can in no way afford, before attempting some questionable dancing at the Regent Hotel’s ‘Tooneys’ Tuesday night, you and I have probably already had many a chat about many a thing.
Though it is possible neither of us remember any such conversation.
Take a look around; enjoy the sight of a particularly gnarled pine tree weighed down with a winter’s worth of snow, framed against the backdrop the most spectacular mountain range you and many of your fellow hikers have ever seen.
But if you, like I, have done this hike so many times over the course of the winter you have stopped casting your eyes to the horizon to fully appreciate the circumstances of your situation, take your arse back to the base of the hike and start all over again, because you deserve the pain you ungrateful little shit.

Take a deep breath, exhale.
Evoke your inner Englishman and utter a stream of swear words so obscene it’s like you’re actually Richard Hammond on a bicycle in peak hour traffic.
Take a deep breath, exhale, and realise in a moment of clarity that this is one aspect of a life you have dreamed of since first discovering snowboarding more than ten years ago.
You will begin to enjoy the mountain air in your lungs a little more than you are struggling with the tequila fermenting in your gut; potentially so much so you will stop forcing your sense of guilt onto an imagined audience in the third person and I may start referring to these non-problems as my own.
So I took a deep breath, exhaled and continued on up the face of Mt Mackenzie, following in the footsteps of three friends and thousands of powder pigs and hungry hounds working for those turns, burning for those turns on the bowls and ridges surrounding Revelstoke Mountain Resort.

Karine and I had hired avalanche beacons and along with Max and Jeff’s back country experience, fully specced gear and avalanche training, we were able to lull ourselves into a sense of security.  
The boot pack was well laid out on the face ahead of us, as the many sunny days of this Spring/Winter had given many a punter an opportunity to search out fresh tracks, so it seemed to be simply a matter of following that to the peak and hoping for the best – with an awareness of the worst.

With one eye on the bootpack and one on the many cornices over hanging the 50+ metre drops to the bowl below, we reached the summit of Mt Mackenzie  in t-shirts and, in my case, a boozy-sweaty mess.
After a breather and Geoff’s participation in the #whereismoke Instagram hashtag, we strapped in and headed down the ridge for the entrance of the Brown Shorts chute which would lead us back to the inbounds area of the resort.
It would be a bittersweet descent; without fresh snow since the previous Friday it was unlikely we would find any new tracks down the chute, but any avalanche danger was substantially lessened for the same reasons.
So there wasn’t much more to it, but to eye out a line, keep my weight heavy on my back foot, keep my ears open for any unusual rumblings from on high, lean over the edge and take the drop.

You pass through the town at the peak of the mountain and the road ahead is suddenly blanketed in cloud and a recent rockfall forces all traffic on to the muddy shoulder which overhangs a hundred metre drop.
You look to the left as your driver makes the sign of the crucifix on his chest.
This may bring peace to the driver but to you it says “we’re going to need divine intervention to get through this alive.”
Inside your head you’re screaming at the driver “mas despacio, por favor” but outwardly you’re attempting to remain calm while the speedo creeps past 80 and he overtakes a ute in the pouring rain on the edge of a cliff again making the sign of the cross.
You reason that he has probably done this drive hundreds of times before and he’s still here to do it for you and your fellow passengers, but the creeping pessimist in your conscience speaks up at this point.
“That just means he hasn’t killed himself yet, doesn’t mean he hasn’t killed anyone else…”
The pessimism doesn’t trail off because it’s finished detailing the reality of this mortal test you paid good money for, but because the blind corner you are now navigating is suddenly occupied by a very much sideways travelling truck and, and much like a computer still running Windows XP when it attempts to do too many things at once, your brain has simply shut off.
You emerge from your lucid blackout somewhere on down the mountain road, and you wonder if the hangover you are nursing through this experience may be your last.

Aside from the time I made a public announcement to inform my mother I had had a goat tattooed on my ribcage in San Diego, this was the first time I had legitimately (sarcastically) feared for my life during my travels through North and South America.
I hadn’t entered in to a shady cocaine deal and ended up being held up at gun point.
I hadn’t wandered off in to the wilderness unprepared and come across the local wildlife.
I hadn’t even attempted to surf the gnarly northern Peruvian coastline.
(In defense of my mortality, I had been hit by a car while skateboarding through traffic in Lima, but only my ego was damaged in that exchange.)
My only crime was to get raucously drunk losing at beer pong against a girl I had met on Tinder and clamber on to a bus hungover and sleep deprived for a seven hour journey to see my first of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Yeah, that second week in October was a week of firsts.
So it was not a punishment; it was not a torturous journey I had entered into unwillingly, it was simply a part of a journey which I had not so much planned as fallen into, hoping it would culminate in an experience worth having, or at least worth sharing.
But it was that 12 hour microcosm of my travels throughout North and South America that, for me at least, would act as a metaphor for the entire journey: entering willingly, and unpreparedly, into the unknown in the hope that I could come away with an experience worth sharing.
I envy those who can travel for self-exploration alone, feasting on the experiences as nutrition for their own soul.
But I have to share these experiences; arrogantly, self-deprecatingly and honestly, as validation that they are experiences worth having.
I see that as a weakness, but if I use skills I know I have, can that attitude in itself not become something from which I can draw strength?

Am I really going to end this post with a rhetorical question?

Would it not be more interesting to finish on a hypothetical situation?

Checkmate.

There has been a few times, and they’ve stuck with me, that I would look down at the dash and all three dials would be pointed directly ahead.
Really they point directly up, but I like to think it is ahead.

The smallest gauge on the left was for fuel, and it seemed to perpetually indicate I had around half a tank left.

The speedometer hovered around 70 miles per hour for the lion’s share of the journey and with cruise control set it rarely wavered from its 12 o’clock setting.

And the tachometer matched the pace of the speedo, and at 70 miles an hour the little engine would be spinning her guts out at a rate of around 3300 revolutions per minute.

Driving in the centre lane of a three lane highway I smiled as I drove through Orlando and past Disney World, glancing at the dials which were arranged in a sort of inverse Mickey Mouse head formation, using the dash to placate any worries I had that forward and further away was not the direction I should be heading.

In reality, the dials are probably designed as a caricature of the car itself, given how much character the VW Beetle has garnered over the years, and how much it relied upon sentimentality when they released the new models in the late 1990s.

And what with my innate pretentiousness constantly bubbling away, I was probably rebelling against that sentimentality and cringing slightly at the idea of driving around the US with it hanging over me that I went for an inverse Mickey Mouse. Much less sentimental. Dickhead.

But after 3,000 miles, damn near 5,000 kilometres in the new money, I’ve entertained the thought of never driving anything else in my life with fairly worrying conviction.

Aside from the built in character of the new Beetle, my particular model, which was apparently the first of the new models off the assembly line in Cincinnati in 1998, has plenty of character from bits falling off.

There is no air conditioning, so climate is sweating-your-tits-off with the windows up, or sweating-your-tits-off with a nice breeze but zero conversation as wind rushing by at 70 miles an hour sucks all human interactions back out on to the highway.

The passenger side window switch also fell out of the door the other day, so if you’re in the passenger seat you’ll need to voice your climate requirements.
The stereo volume control is also questionable, as it doesn’t work, turn it a little more, doesn’t work, turn it a little more, doesn’t work, turn it a li- MAX VOLUME OH GOD TURN IT OFF.

The ceiling cloth has also lost all contact with the body of the car, and is held up with a combination of thumb tacks and bulldog clips, both of which fail at more than 100 kilometres an hour.

But those three dials are still pointing dead ahead, leading me and all that character around these great United States of America, and I will continue to follow their lead.

I could quantify my time in New York in a variety of different ways.
I could create a bar graph and plot the actual physical time I spent in the state against the number of bars I visited with a correlating set of data points denoting the number of drinks consumed in each which would invariably fade into obscurity due to my propensity to not remember anything past the third or fourth drink.
I could, theoretically, count the number of total Instagram photo likes I’ve received since landing against the number of photos and compare it to previous likes on previous photos and record how much social media cred I have gained on my travels and therefore how much cooler/more interesting I may be perceived to be since becoming a hashtag traveller. But hashtag fuck that.
I could put the number of places I’ve slept at night (or not slept) against the dollars I’ve spent on accommodation but it would come out at something like [eight beds:zero dollars] because apparently I’m a bit of a legend when it comes to convincing strangers to let me sleep in their house.
Or, more accurately, I met a few legends who felt sorry for me and let me sleep in the house.
But ultimately, what any numerical gauge of New York will do is fall short of justifying the absolutely wild time I’ve had here.
And that’s wild in the animalistic, explorational sense, as I’ve never been heavy in to the party scene, and many things I saw sober during the day were as personally confronting as those I saw (or did) buckled by night.
The number of great cafes I found doesn’t go any way to indicating the number of good conversations I had with the people in them.
The number of kilometres I walked doesn’t in any way describe the things I saw, heard and experienced as I walked them. Though it does go some way to driving home my refusal to use the imperial system to measure distance.
The subway rides and the tickets bought; the concerts seen and sing-alongs sung; the crosswalks crossed and the taxis dodged; the spare change given and the spare change not; the rooftops dancefloors and the basement clubs; the forever from the skyline and the claustrophobia of the street; the individual beauty and the collective criminal; it’s all greater than the sum of its parts.
I won’t exercise any of my considerable arrogance to try and reflect on my time in New York on a broader scale, because I’m still overwhelmed at the size of the city and any advice I could give would be fairly obscure and specific (When staying in Bushwick take the M-train from Wyckoff-Myrtle to Essex Street for the skate shop on the Lower East Side that sells Vegemite.)
But I will say that if you’re going in to New York City and you’re anything like me, ease yourself into it. Give it a week and get out.
I did two weeks straight up, and as someone who hasn’t lived in a city, a couple of times I needed to find the centre of Central Park and lie under a tree where I couldn’t see the sky scrapers and pretend the noise of the city was the crashing of waves at the beach.
I also went to the beach at Far Rockaway, and I get the feeling that may have been comparable to a New Yorker going to Adelaide to experience a city again.
I’m about to board a bus for a ten hour trip to Columbus, Ohio for the next leg of my journey, and I’m excited for a horizon that isn’t skyscrapers.