On Vacations

Lesley and I are going to the heart of McCain country, Arizona and New Mexico, really we want to see New Mexico. I have had a long put off dream of seeing the Grand Canyon but yet again we just could not fit it in, what time we spend in Arizona will be in South Eastern AZ, the Grand Canyon is in the North West corner of that state. One of these days we will see the work that hundreds of millions of years of erosion did to the Arizona desert, just not this time.

Although I do not expect to have too many chances to update this blog I will be keeping a travel journal. I imagine the perspective I have, a Canadian in Arizona the week before the presidential election where Arizona's favorite son is due to be emasculated and eviscerated, may, I hope prove informative. I will be taking Friday off work, I will drive to Lesley's office at noon, pick her up and we will drive to Buffalo, we will fly to Phoenix via Philadelphia (sadly I will miss Pittsburgh the one other American city of any size, that I can think of, with a name that starts with P... Pensacola, oops, forgot about that one!). We will return a week and a day later, Saturday night. (Why fly out of Buffalo? Because the airfare is less than half the price, important moral tale if you plan to fly to the United States, drive to Buffalo or Detroit first.)

I expect to have commentary on two things, the experiment in self government we call the United States of America, and what things are like in the South Western Desert.

Other than that, it looks like the weather will be downright awful in Toronto while I am gone, so I am glad Lesley picked this coming week to go.

In unrelated news, a friend of mine sent me a comic explanation of the Subprime meltdown. I have been trying to convert it from PowerPoint to Jpeg so I can upload it to the blog. Suffice it to say, there is a reason people should not use Microsoft products!