25 Things

25 things you may or may have not known about America/Americas that you’re probably not going to care about;

1.  Americans are friend hungry.
2. Everyone breaks up with Republicans because Republicans hate everything fun.
3. I’ve been told to never ever go to the South because it’s the elephant graveyard of America (with the exception of Austin and New Orleans of course).
4.  If you fall asleep on the Subway in NYC, the worse thing that will happen to you is that will make a new Facebook friend. 
5. Pennsylvania’s state animal is the MILF.
6. R Kelly’s remix to Ignition is still big in the West. I approve.
7. Cheese Wiz is evil. Don’t ever eat it. Don’t even look at it with a sideward glance. I’m pretty sure it helped OJ hide his other glove.
8. Eating a Philly Cheese Stake will shave off 10 years from your life expectancy but it's 10 years well spent.
9.  How they measure things is stupid. 
10. If you have an Australian accent, you’re going to have a good time.
11.  Everyone in Philadelphia that drinks on a Thursday night has some kind of crippling personal problem they’re all far too eager to talk about. When someone appears normal… she’s probably not. 
12. She probably owns a lot of cats and you have to make excuses to leave her party super early.
13.  They have drive thru banks here. Like. You can do your banking without getting out of the car.
14. The country is based on the solid theory that if it exists, it can be deep fried.
15.  There’s a massive rivalry between The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Every time there are 20+ Red Sox fans in a pub or train or park they will start a ‘fuck the Yankees’ chant.
    Because they are envious.
16.  Americans like chanting.
17. If I ate fast food everyday, for every meal, for a month, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even smash out half of the fast food chains.
18. Vegas will destroy you.
19. Don’t try to explain who Blinky Bill is. You will just sound retarded.
20. The Liberty Bell is not a monument that wants to be licked, trust me, but it is one I will conquer.
21. Denver has snow-topped mountains.
22.  I’ve been asked if ‘I’m a friend of Ellen’s’ at least twice. I enjoyed it.
23. Someone asked me if we have internet. Like legit asked me if Australia has the internet. I politely asked them if it was a series of cans tied together, connected with fishing wire.
24. If you want anything here to sell well, call it ‘Freedom (insert name of product)’ or ‘Liberty (whatever)’.
25. People from New York are better than you.

This list happened because I’m currently stuck at the airport for a five-hour lay over in Denver and I’m bored.

The Secret World of Skydiving

Living in Whistler is similar to living as a lollie inside a pick-n-mix bag (I'm obviously a watermelon wine gum). You get to meet some very colorful characters from a variety of different places. It also means you find yourself going to strange places to visit them, which is how we ended up at a Skydiving camp to see Ben.

The drive there was made exasperatingly longer because Jodie had never, in the three years of owning her car, checked her tires. Resulting in three girls caring a rotten wheel through a Sears shopping mall auto section. I rolled up my sleeves and hoped my inner lesbian meant I was also a naturally good mechanic (?)

I was.

Hayley explained that we'd be staying the night at the housing they had on the airbase. I was a little confused because I've never heard of a Skydiving business also offering accommodation but too proud to question it, I said something like "cool, whatever, sounds good." 

Then Hayley made some comment about how I would also be jumping that day but too proud to question it, I said something like " cool, whatever, sounds good." 

As we got closer to our destination, the directions pulled us off the paved road and onto a small beaten track through the bush. I was half suspecting we were going the wrong way, when suddenly there was a massive air hanger in the middle of the forest. 

An older gentleman greeted us and asked if we'd be jumping that day. Although the three of us said yes, I couldn't understand how I'd ended up actually doing it.

During some lovely small talk with this guy, he told us he'd thrown himself out of a plane some 5,000+ times and when he spoke about it his eyes brightened. The roughness in his voice changes and softens as he smiles slightly at the end of every sentence.

When you are given the opportunity to glance into people’s lives, from all over the world, you realize some things are just so universal.

The weather isn’t the best though and we can’t jump with the cloud cover too heavy. “It’s not like back home,” Ben says to me. “There’s forest everywhere and if we can’t see the landing area properly, things get pretty hairy.” So everyone that lives and works there and the three of us wait our time out patiently outside, hoping the clouds clear.

In Whistler, we keep our heads towards the sky while we pray and hope for snow. When all the conditions are perfect, the entire town is throwing themselves down steep powdery runs and dodging trees. You wait for the fresh snow and when your patience is rewarded it’s the greatest feeling in the world. A town united by their respect for the mountains and their love of the powder.

That’s our religion.

And Skydiving is theirs.

The hours we spent waiting crawled past as I entertained myself with a game the jumpers had invented (involving a metal hoop tied to piece of sting that dangled from the rafters and a hook. Which I would later proclaimed could ‘go fuck itself’ in a burst of great frustration).

“There’s no way we’ll be able to jump today,” Ben broke to us. “We’ll just have to hope that tomorrow’s better.”

With comical timing our names were called over the PA system to suit up and prepare to meet our tandem partners. I was so nervous; what happened next skipped my memory completely. All I could think about was hoping I’d be able to see my dog again and that I was glad I had strong pelvic floor muscles otherwise I would have for sure pissed myself.

Before I knew it, I was rapidly climbing altitude harnessed to a stranger that was the difference between life and death for me. 

As he walked me to the side door of the plane, I screamed internally. DON’T JUMP YOU FUCKING IDIOT!! WHY ARE YOU NOT LISTENING TO ME?!

"If you could bottle what you're about to feel," he yells in my ear over the wind, "I'd buy it for a million dollars." 

And he flings me out the door.

I crumple my face and my stomach feels like it's trying to escape out of my ears and butt all at once and my brain congratulates me on killing us. 

In the longest second of my life, I know I'm going to die and I come to terms with it.

I open my eyes. 

Then...

Nothing. 

Not a sound. Not in my mind or in my ears and I see the entire world unfolding bellow me.

I see clouds with a peachy hue, mountaintops peaking out from blow them and the sun caressing their every line with his loving embrace.

I don’t know god but I’m closer to whatever god is than ever before.

The adrenaline washes over me and I don’t blink out of fear of missing it all.

I'm falling from 14,000 feet and I'm so unafraid. “In that moment I am infinite.”

Later that night we join everyone else in the camp, welcomed and initiated, with simply a glimpse into what these people do every day. This was their normal.

“Do you want to go out onto the air field and light some fireworks?” Ben asks us.

I’m certain that travelling is the greatest gift I’ve ever given to myself.

Wanting Alaska.

If you've ever met me or ever read anything I've written you'll know three things;
1) I'm almost always wearing an item of clothing that as a hole in it.
2) I really like salmon.
3) My hero is a man that burnt all his money, kissed goodbye to a life of conventional living and opened his eyes to a world that still remains so unknown to so many.

Maybe it was the day that we sat in a hotel room and my beautiful friend told me who Christopher McCandless was and implored me to find out for myself or the day that my best friend gave the book to me to read or maybe long before either of those things even occurred that I wanted to go to Alaska.

I remember when I'd first arrived in KL, a conversation I'll never forget outside of a Starbucks at 2am about how I'd love to one day make my way to Alaska. I thought to myself "someday, someday I'll know what it feels like to be there."

But a wanting of something isn't ever really enough, Roosevelt pointed this out to me. He asked "what are you going to do to get the things you want?"

My answer wasn't a courageous one. It's scary to deal with, all this wanting.

It wasn't until I took a seat next to a man on a train going from Stockholm to Karlstad that it changed. I still remember his calming, vibrant blue eyes, yellow-grey speckled hair and how he smiled with his eyes.

His name was Beau-Jacobs.

I've tried to write about him so many times in the past but nothing seemed to do him justice.
You see Beau changed how I saw the world like only a stranger can. In those four hours, he taught me more about myself then most people I'd known for years. He was an environmental scientist, he'd recently married the love of his life, he enjoyed his hobby as a carpenter and was building a house in the Swedish country-side with he bare hands.
When he spoke, I believed every word that left his mouth and he seemed to fill me with all the danger that comes with believing in yourself.

"So this Alaska dream," he pauses to give me time to collect my thoughts, "why don't you just go there?"

A hundred reasons scroll through my head like a check list of fears but none of them seem fit enough for me to say a loud. Not to Beau. To anyone else, perhaps but not to the man who had just spent hours teaching me philosophy and all he'd discovered about the world during his own travels.

And "I will," is all that comes out of my mouth. The wanting escalates.

When his stop arrives, he looks me in the eyes, smiles and says something completely unprovoked that still baffles me. "Don't worry Tara, she'll find you," and I can't even talk because my armour is so cracked that it's pushing down on my ribs and he leaves me sitting there filled with confusion and hope and I promise myself something.

The next day I share my first kiss abroad, at 3 am sitting on top of a hill in the country-side. "You're so fucking amazing," she whispers in my ear and because of that memory, I've never felt lonely again.

When Isaac and I ventured to the Grand Canyon, it changed how I saw nature. It made me happy to simply be alive and it washed every other thought from me. Cleansed me.

In exactly one week time, I'll be boarding the flight I thought I'd never have the courage to get on. In an almost taunting way, tonight I can see the Northern Lights from my balcony and any hope that I had of sleep has escaped me because I'm kept awake by my wanting.

Riding in Cars with Girls.

I’ve never travelled with girls before...

It’s quite strange that I haven’t. I think at one stage I was in a group that consisted of something like seven boys and myself. My New Yorker was confused when she saw who I'd rolled into town with. Her immediate reaction was to ask; ‘where's the harem of male followers you normally have running around with you?’ So for me to travel with Hayley and Jodie made me a little nervous.

We’d all met working together in Whistler and we all lived in staff housing. With quality bonding activities like this;

everyone gets to know each other pretty quickly.

We'd decided to go to Ontario to see Jodie because she'd left Whistler to go back home some time ago. Fun fact, I'd almost decided to live in Toronto over Vancouver so I was curious how my life would have played out if I'd made a different decision.

One thing that surprised me, was how flat the landscape is. The horizon stretches on for days and there’s barely a hill let alone any mountains. It's for this reason that Canadians in BC call it On-terrible. I think it's still pretty though because of all the fresh water lakes.

As far as the city itself is concerned, Toronto has so many things going for it. 

In 1992, on a hot Summers day, a woman took off her shirt and bra to expose her naked breast in public. After she was fined for indecent exposure, she took the inequality issue to court because men expose their hairy nipples.

It’s now legal for women to be topless in public.

That is probably my favorite Toronto fact and not just because of the obvious reasons. It sums up the city pretty well. Anything goes in Toronto. We also happened to be there during Gay Pride Week and I wondered what on Earth it would be like (marriage equality’s the hot protest topic in Australia and the argument against practically bores me now).

Would it just be one glorious week of Canadians screaming ‘we’re gay!’, colourful parades and pretty beads?! 

Nope, pride week in Canada had Canadians being proud to be gay, but it also acknowledged transgender and transsexual's within the community. Welcoming them. Embracing who they were.

I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that wouldn’t feel at home in Toronto. 

Well maybe if you’re bi-sexual… greedy bastards.

I was also just really excited to be travelling again. We’d planned out a routine for our road trip and assumed our roles. Jodie drove, 

I directed,

Hayley supplied her amazing company.

Being so used to travelling with guys, I’d forgotten how much girls talk when you're stuck in a confide space with them. Girls can talk so much more about a lot less.

For starters I didn’t know it was possible to divide the topic of ‘hair’ into a plethora of sub-topics. Like the best way to remove an ingrown hair, why store bought hair dye is so bad for your hair, how this shampoo doesn’t clean your hair as well as this other shampoo and the pros and cons to the thickness/thinness of ones hair.

Travelling as a group of three girls is weird because it seems to attract packs of (generally) strange and unattractive men. Hayley happily giggling and joking with 5 male security guards in the most homosexual part of Toronto, while Jodie drowns in a sea of all too keen lesbians, wasn’t exactly an irregular occurrence.

They also seem to get me into a lot more trouble.

It’s definitely something special when I can comfortably let myself fall asleep as Jodie’s little spoon and then having to say sorry for drooling on her pillow and she apologizes for drooling all over my back.

I love that we’re three people from very different backgrounds and from opposite parts of the world but we couldn’t relate to each other any better because we share the same passion;

Travelling. 

People, Skiing and the Promise of Everything I've Ever Wanted, in Alaska.

An impressive statistic, today is my 241st day of travelling.

What I never really write about are some of the amazing people I've met whilst I've been away. One, I generally like to keep those experiences to myself and two, it makes me sound so gay when I talk about it.

When I left home, I had this idea of independence and it was difficult for me to learn that being independent doesn't mean being alone and sometimes it means that once in a while you're going to need to swallow your pride and ask for help (it would have made navigating my way around Germany's Autobahn much easier had I simply been less stubborn). 

For example, my relationship with skiing is strongly intertwined with my epic bromance with Caitlin Brown. 

After my first skiing accident, I was petrified. I couldn't get over the trauma of being wrapped up in one of those shinny silver blankets they give emotional drunks and skied down by patrol. Caitlin offered to teach me and I declined at first.

It was a shame of mine, this panic inducing, heart pounding, stomach churning, fear. I would dream about injuring myself over and over again.

People offered to take me up but I didn't trust anyone not to get frustrated waiting for me, so I snuck up the mountain once, alone because I figured I'd save myself the embarrassment of hyper-ventilating in-front of company.

After I well and truly traumatised myself for the second time, I took up Caity's offer. I've been grateful for her company everyday since. She made skiing fun. She talked me through icy runs and waist deep powder.

We'd rap on chairlifts and scream Azalea Banks lyrics at one another. She was patient and quickly slipped into the role of proud parent when I started parallel turning and, eventually, carving. 

Heck, it didn't take me long to start howling like a wolf through the backcountry and doing small jumps out of trees to scare Sarah for being too cautious (which is what Molly taught me, while Caity yelled that I should remember a little bit of fear was healthy. Probably why I did deserve my second set of knee injuries).

For the rest of my life, skiing will always remind me of my bromance with Brown Town.

Just like how smores will forever remind me of Laura. 

It must have been well after 11pm when she called me one evening to ask me what I was doing, "we're going on an adventure!" she exclaimed. After she assured me it wasn't to the seven eleven to buy her cigarettes again (like our 2am adventure last week was), I put some shoes on and met her by my letter box.

We made our way, with two guys that work in the kitchen of our hotel, to Alta lake. They taught me how to make a camp fire on ice, how to cook a marshmallow without setting it alight and burning the shit out of it and how to balance a Grahamcracker on your knee. 

I won't forget the reflection of the full moon on the frozen lake and the way it made the surrounding mountains glow blue. There are moments when you experience pure happiness, I'm sure this was one of them. I instantly regretted not bringing my camera or phone or a paper and pen or stone and chisel to help me remember it. 

When it eventually became all too much, I looked up at Laura with the admiration I'm sure beams from my face during times like this. She smiled, sighed, rolled her eyes a little and said "is this going to be one of those days where we share every meal together again...?" 

I'm sure I'll still know her in twenty years time because when someone takes the shirt off of their own back so can clean the vomit on your face after a 13 hour drinking bender, you know that's a special kind of friendship.

See... I told you... GAYEEE!

At the start of my ski season I toyed with the idea of kayaking the South-East tip of Alaska. I thought I would spend three weeks independent and alone. Nothing but the promise of bears, salmon, open woods, bears, orcas, glaciers, bears and singing Pocahontas' Just Around The River Bend shamelessly loud.

The idea is to start at Juneau and make my way down to Ketichkan.

I was telling a few people about my travel plans one day, after borrowing a series of Alaskan travel books from the library (bitches love bitches with books), when Jodie told me she was coming too.

I really expected myself to be irritated or annoyed but I wasn't... I was... actually excited. Now instead of spending hours looking at dates and emailing companies alone, Jodie sits on the floor next to me reminding me to add mosquito repellant to the list, telling me bear horror stories or asking me what the red flashing light on her new GoPro means.

You can't be afraid to let people in because like my friend Penny would always tell me,  a 'life lived in fear is a life half lived.'

Independence was something travelling both taught me and made me forget. Meeting these people has changed me. I used to always write alone late at night, but now, I'm smiling because Caity's sitting here beside me nagging me to make sure I 'drink my tea before it gets cold.' 

And these are just few people I've met in Whistler.

My friend Whistler.

While I like to think that my move to Canada has nothing to do with pursuing my love of all things Tegan and Sara, I'd just be lying to myself.

My relationship with Whistler is vastly different to all the other places I've visited.

I think I'd reached that point when I could have happily returned home feeling fulfilled because I'd seen so much about two months ago. I started regretting signing that 6 month contract with the hotel.

When my brother and I were young and new to Australia, we had a friend that lived down the road from us. Morgan, I think his name was. I remember Morgan always getting us into trouble. He taught me my first swear word. One day, during a game of chasey with several other neighbourhood kids, he'd convinced us all that it would be a good idea to use my mums car as the home base.

Which evolved into Morgan standing of the roof of the car proclaiming he was king and we could all go fuck ourselves. Irritated by his monarchal reign, while he told us to kiss his butt, we too decided to climb onto the roof of the car. As we jumped and yelled at who was more in charge my six year old brain couldn't foresee that the downward force of seven elementary children jumping and dancing on a car roof would cause a sort of inversion in its shell.

In other words, we caused the car roof to bow inwards and I remember thinking that it looked like an elephant had sat on it and the odds of my mother believing such a story was slim in suburban Perth.

To say that my mum was less than impressed would be an understatement because your ability to drive a car is greatly impaired when your neck is craned to the side and your back contorted over the steering wheel.

We spent every afternoon, for god knows how long, plucking weeds from our garden. In order to learn a valuable lesson.

If Whistler was a person, he'd be Morgan. You know, the one that your parents never really approved of because when you went out with him, you'd come home with bruises and scrapes or you'd be dragged home by the ear by someone demanding to speak to your mother.

Whistler cares not for responsibility. It's a ski town where thousands upon thousands of people come to shed their suit and party their face off.

Living here is bazar.

A life of perpetual irresponsibility.

When I first met Whistler, I was overwhelmed. He pushes me to do things out of my comfort zone and I found myself questioning why. Like throwing myself down a 90 degree incline with these wooden boards strapped to my feet.
So I shouldn't have been surprised when I ended up as a sadness burrito being towed down the hill by the ski patrol on a day where my confidence didn't match my skiing ability (or lack there of).

There isn't much reason to the things that anyone dose here.

And it's perfectly fine.

Whistler's taught me that there doesn't need to be meaning in everything we do in life because sometimes it's fun to just mindlessly pursue happiness and get yourself into a shit load of trouble along the way.