"On clear nights from my upstairs bedroom, close to the Manitoba/Ontario border, I could actually get WLS radio station in Chicago, almost a thousand miles away".

 Now the blog has never been constrained by time, space or location and over the last decade, it has touched almost all the continents, and slipped back beyond the Paleolithic to the dinosaurs and almost to the Big Bang.

I suppose it does remain a tad Eurocentric but that is because Europe is where I live and where my family originated from.  

My own family can be traced back to the east Highlands of Scotland, as well as middle England and northern Germany, while my partner’s parents are from Naples and she from Varese in the north of Italy.

Added to all of that, I have a son in Warsaw, and I grew up in southeast London.

But we do have family in Ontario, a nephew in Australia, and I can call on friends in North America, the Middle East and the Far East.

All of which is an introduction to two pictures from Yellowstone Park, which is mostly in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extends into Montana and Idaho.  

They were taken by Kevin V Smith who kindly gave me permission to use them, and like others by my friend Lori who lives in Canada, it is the sheer size of the landscape which fascinates me.

Europe is in comparison a small place, and you won’t travel far before bumping into a settlement, village, town or city.

But the vast expanse of North America can seem quite breath taking, so when my Canadian cousins talk of the Trans Canadian Highway they are talking of a railway which stretches 2, 775 miles from Toronto in Ontario to Vancouver in British Columbia.

If we were to travel from Manchester to Istanbul which sits at the very edge of Europe, we would have travelled just 839 miles, encountered a shed load of countries, each with their own language and history and many with a different currency

But for my cousin the journey would all be under a Canadian sun, with English spoken almost all of the the way and the sure knowledge that the petrol bought in Ingersol would come out of the same money as the payment for  the burger at the stop over half way and the groceries at the tiny supermarket close to their destination.

And I was reminded of all that when my friend Susan also from Canada told me of how “on clear nights throughout the 1960's, from my upstairs bedroom, close to the Manitoba/Ontario border, I could actually get WLS radio station in Chicago, almost a thousand miles away. They played songs I never heard anywhere else.”

All of which stirred the pot and made me begin to think of many things, but uppermost it was that idea of listening across the open lands of Canada to a radio station in Chicago and not for the first time I pondered on the vastness of North America.

Location; North America

Pictures; Yellowstone Park, 2021, courtesy of Kevin V Smith