Category Archives: Uncategorized

My wife (Jen) and I recently visited The Seine River Cafe for breakfast, a  quiet, unassuming store front diner tucked in behind a Shell station and a Dairy Queen on Provencher, the central route winding its way through Winnipeg’s French district. It had been on my list of restaurants to visit for a while, beingContinue reading “Learning How To Age In a World That No Longer Makes Sense: What It Means To Similtaneously Grieve and Preserve That Which Is Lost”

Every once in a while I unearth something from my childhood years that I forgot existed. I have no idea where this small remnant of a story was going, but it’s something I was starting to write back when, my best guess, I was around 10 or 12 years old. Figured I’d type it outContinue reading “When Cleaning the Basement Unearths The Remnants of a Potential Story Now Lost to Time”

“Even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, (it) continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.”(page 57, This Homeward Ache)) The “it” in this equation is Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, a German word that Lewis cites in his autobiography as aContinue reading “This Homeward Ache: How Our Longings Reveal the Shape This World, and How Our Beliefs Shape Our Hope In It”

Only fitting that a train (among other) disruptions would go on to define the final part of my pilgrimage. It begins with my shuttle from Stonehenge back to Salisbury Station, where I would complete the final leg of my journey over to Oxford, being an hour late. This required changing my train ticket to aContinue reading “To Arrive Back Where I Began: Finding the Power of Story on The Streets of Oxford and Making My Way Home”

As the sun comes up on the final full day of my literary pilgrimage, I find myself climbing the hill to the heart of the ancient city of Exeter. Knowing this was the central hub for all trains travelling in any direction, be it west to Cornwall, South to the Salisbury Plains, East to London,Continue reading “A Pilgrimage to Stonehenge: Where World’s Collide and the Sacred Survives”

David Suchet, whom helped bring Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, Hercule Poirot, to life on the small screen from 1989 to 2013, wrote a recently released book called Travels With Agatha Christie, in which he, along with his wife Sheila, retrace the steps of her early promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (whichContinue reading “Meeting The Legacy of a Quiet, Strong, Complicated Mystery Writer and Revolutionary: Walking in the Footsteps of Agatha Christie”

The evening sun is setting as I drag my now weathered luggage up the cobblestone streets of York back to York Station. I am heading, briefly, back to London, this time taking a different route on a train that is both running and on time. Here the landscape, still visible in the slow descent ofContinue reading “Arriving At King Arthur’s Court: Understanding The Meaning of a Pilgrimage at Tintagel”

And look! In through the window of the train carriage, next to his rattling first-class teacup, can be spied a notebook, which is aspiringly, if provisionally, titled: The Complete Guide to Britain’s Only Named Wind. Marverlous! It’s about time someone wrote a book for Helm …  I intend to capture its very spirit and IContinue reading “To Name The Wind Amidst the Horror: Ascending the Steps in My Pilgrimage to Whitby”

A day in the Cotswolds. That’s what my tour was called (shout out to the wonderful people at Go Cotswolds, a small grassroots company with a small passionate team who will quickly tell you before the tour starts: there’s no way to actually see the Cotswolds in a day). Another early morning wake up call,Continue reading “A Day in The Cotswolds and an Evening In Dark Basements: When Things Don’t Go As Planned”

Sitting adjacent to The Salisbury plains is an area known as the Cotswolds, a word that combines the phrase sheep pen (cot) with hills (wold), reaching back to the Roman introduction of the Cotswold Lion (sheep) into these still rolling hills. Here is a world preserved in time, having escaped the sweep of the industrialContinue reading “Shakespeare, Resistance, and Interpreting the Great Play of Life: A Pilgrimage Into a Storied Literary Place”