Guest Blogger today

To start off October with a bang, I have a guest blogger, Michael Harling, who usually writes about his life in Great Britain, but decided to take me up on my offer to drop by when he found himself in the neighborhood. Just in time for the foliage to be turning color. Take it away, Mike.

Endless Summer : The Postcards Tour Finale

I started this tour just as summer was beginning, so it seems fitting to end it just as summer draws to a close and autumn takes over. It's been fun and I've met a lot of great people, but touring is tiring, even in the virtual world, so I'm taking advantage of that magic we call the Internet to round up the Kindness of Strangers Tour by relying on the kindness of several strangers at once. In a way, making my final tour stop to ten locations simultaneously seems the perfect ending for it, one big autumnal burst before quietly fading away.

This tour began as a means of promoting my book, but it soon became an end in itself and took on a life of its own. Very often, I found myself having such a good time "visiting" people around the globe that I forgot to mention the book. To date, my trip has taken me from Britain to Canada, Australia, sunny Spain, Tenerife and even back to my own hometown, ending up here in Maine with Linda.

In case you've never been here, Maine is a big place, with lot and lots and lots of trees. My wife and I spent two days driving through them two summers ago. Mistakenly believing my British wife would get a good glimpse of the stunning scenery that is New England, I scheduled a car trip from one end of Maine to the other during our visit. All she saw for two straight days was a huge trench made up of pine trees on the left, pine trees on the right and a straight ribbon of macadam for a base where she sat in a car looking out at pine trees to the right and pine trees to the left! You get the idea.

I tried to tell her that Maine was a beautiful state containing stunning, rugged wilderness. And if you go out as far as Monmouth, they still have Indian attacks. But she wasn't having any of that; mostly she just played the licence plate game and got occasional enjoyment by punching me every time she saw (or imagined she saw) a VW Beetle (c'mon, you remember "Punch-Buggy!" from when you were a teenager).

Time to wrap this final post up; Linda is telling me I have to help her close the stockade doors and bolt the shutters.

I have to say, of all the adventures I might have imagined for my life as a young boy, touring the blogsphere on other people's blogs was not a contender. But then the idea of leaving my quiet, rural life, moving to England, marrying a foreigner and writing a book about it never occurred to me, either. I'm glad and grateful for having done both, however, and although the tour is coming to an end, the adventure continues.

May yours continue as well.

Thanks and Good-bye from

The 2009 KINDNESS of STRANGERS TOUR?

Visit the Tour Page for the latest Tour updates.


Michael Harling is the author of
"Postcards From Across the Pond" dispatches from an accidental expat.

"Laugh out loud funny regardless of which side of the pond you call home. Bill Bryson move over, there's a new American expat in town with a keen sense of humor." -- Jeff Yeager, author of “The Ultimate Cheapskate�


Buy the Book: http://www.lindenwald.com/booksale.htm

Follow the Tour: http://www.lindenwald.com/thetour.htm

Visit the Home Page: http://postcardsfromacrossthepond.blogspot.com/