Littlest Finch

This has all of my ‘Follow that Finch’ photos in one place, in an up-to-date gallery that I’ll continue to add to as my trip progresses and I take more photos.

I arrived in London midday on Friday after a late flight from Boston on Thursday night. The flight first went to Reykjavik, where I was surrounded by a bunch of Boston twenty and thirty-something men on their way to Iceland for a bachelor party. They’d started drinking well before we boarded the plane, so needless to say, it was not a fun flight. Also, landing in Iceland? Terrifying and really disorienting! When the sky, ocean and land are impossible to distinguish, I imagine it’s a bit what purgatory is like. No thank you! I was only in Iceland for about ...

This little finch needs a name and rather than just decide on something, I’d love to get some suggestions from you! Once I’ve gotten a good number of ideas for what to name this little bird, I will have a vote to decide the winner.  Whoever suggested the name will win a free 8×10 print of the illustration of their choice.  Submit up to five names in the comments (you can submit them in a single comment as a list or in separate comments for each one if, for instance, you suggest one name and think of more later). Obviously ...

I decided to have a little fun and make a little cardboard finch to bring around with me and take pictures with during my trip – similar to what a lot of people have done with Flat Stanley. Flat Stanley, for the uninitiated, is a character from a children’s book in the 60s that spawned a series. Why is Flat Stanley flat? A poster fell on Flat Stanley while he was sleeping and flattened him (spoiler alert: he gets inflated with a bike pump and it all works out in the end.) Flat Stanley uses his newfound flatness to stow ...

Just over a week before my trip – I’ll be spending a month in Europe, visiting England (London, Liverpool, Newcastle), Scotland (Edinburgh, Outer Hebrides), France (Paris, Nice), Belgium (Bruges, Brussels), Netherlands (The Hague, Amsterdam, Wassenaar), and Italy (Rome, Naples). Started packing quite early, mostly because I’ve never traveled for such a long time with the caveat of one bag and I’m trying to be as organized as possible, shocking, if you know me. I went from being extremely excited (December – March) when planning the trip, to extremely nervous (when April rolled around and it was ‘next month’) to slightly ...

After spending almost a full 24 hours alone in my apartment, locked down close to the situation in Watertown, with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, in a state of such bizarre fear, I don’t know if I can even accurately describe it. I’d waver from sheer panic, delirium, distraction with attempts at jokes and humour, exhaustion, and finally ending in a strange relief. My brain knows it can relax, but my body is still in that fight or flight mode. When you can’t leave your house, that tends to go haywire. So, when I finally got to go outside, I ...