Ferien - Holidays

It’s not often that one of these randomly selected German words is completely relevant to the moment. Although not currently on holiday, just two minutes ago I was doing a final bit of price-comparison research jazz for flights that will almost certainly be booked tomorrow. The plan is to fly into New York on March 11th, returning to Heathrow from San Francisco just over two weeks later. The rest is at this point is entirely unplanned and may well stay that way. While travelling around the Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania back in September, I had a complete, thoroughly-planned itinerary involving hostel bookings and flights that in the end were never used. What was supposed to be four nights in Tallinn became ten, leaving Helsinki and Riga, as well as the flight between them excluded from the holiday. While there are savings to made by booking travel and accommodation in advance, I’ve learned it’s terribly constraining and can seriously impede your fun. So keeping it loose and free - besides having to be San Francisco by March 26th - will hopefully maximise my enjoyment, and should I fall in love with a certain city, hostel, or a group of people, sticking around is unlikely to have any negative financial consequences. There are so many possibilities, so many places I can’t wait to explore across the whole continent, from Vancouver to Miami and everywhere in between. Even having spent over two months in the US and Canada two years ago, North America is so huge and has so much to offer, I’m itching to get back, even if it is for just a couple of weeks. The embarrassing lack of humour in this piece is testament to how excited I truly am about returning! So here is a last-ditch attempt to shoehorn in some funnies: boob, pissflaps, cockballs, pooface, turd-toucher… actually that isn’t working at all. So I’ll simply say thank you America for electing Mr Obama, and please accept my greatly-depreciated British currency as a token of my gratitude. In three months time. At which point it’ll be about five pounds to the dollar and I’ll have to slog my way across your massive country hitching rides and performing lewd acts for cash. See you soon!