parkrun: Mount Ainslie
Coming Home
Jess runs the run
Read the complete story — without becoming a member — at this link.
It may seem odd to visit Finland for a weekend; I know I would once have thought it baffling.
But the story of how I found my companion — my little BBC Radio teddy bear — comes from a time in my life when I travelled rather more widely.
I made two round-the-world trips in 2006 and this first one had a bit of planning. And writing up. I pasted scraps — ticket stubs, maps, receipts and so on — into a surprisingly lyrical journal.
Canberra to Perth to Melbourne to Sydney on Qantas, Sydney to Hong Kong to Osaka on Cathay Pacific, where I slept on the couch of a lady from Manhattan and she took me down to Hiroshima. That hit me harder than I thought and there were tears shed.
Osaka to Hong Kong to Paris, where I roamed the Latin Quarter, had the world’s worst shower experience, found myself under the Eiffel Tower at dawn, and took a train to Normandy after a rushed breakfast. I hired a car in Caen, went through some stressful moments in a manual car at rush hour on the wrong side of the road in a strange city before the days of GPS, and found my way to Omaha Beach.
