The old cliché has it that life is a journey.  I’m not so sure about that.  But what I can confirm is sometimes a journey changes your life. 

 

And a road trip - as Hollywood knows so well - can adjust your personal story arc beyond your imagination.

 

And so it was with our honeymoon.  Jason is an East Coaster (New York) and I am English.  For both of us, as gays of a certain age, America’s West Coast remained The Promised Land.  Even with the spectre of President Trump looming - perhaps because of that spectre and the very real fear that America, once Trumped, would never be the same again - our one wish was to be Simon and Garfunkel and to walk off to look for America.

 

If you’re inclined to read our little pamphlet of pics and prose - of our life-changing, opinion-altering adventures, I beg you first to click here and soak up that Simon and Garfunkel song. So much has been written about the myth of America but nothing quite sums up the simple hope and promise of this too proud nation quite like this song - a stumpy Jew and a prematurely balding gentile trying to see the woods of their homeland for the trees of the mythologising.

 

Our “Honeymoon Guide” was written some 14 months before Trump won the election but I hope retrospect offers a bittersweet poignancy. We still love America and Americans (and hey, we Brexited so, you know, glass houses).   But we feel the only dependable answers lie in truly understanding the problem.

 

Finally, you will see a whole bunch of thanks to our friends dotted throughout the pamphlet. That’s because, instead of toasters and silver-plated coffee spoons, our wedding guests paid for our honeymoon adventures. For which we will be eternally grateful. A toaster has an average shelf-life of five years. Being forced out of the air, mid-fuck by the President’s air force?  That’s a memory we will take to our graves.

 

I hope that peaks your interest enough to read on….

 

PS.  Yes, I wrote all the words.   That’s because I once did a course on alliteration, litotes and onomatopoeia. But all of the experiences, distillations, anecdotes and observations are ours together. And, of course all the visual material is provided by Jason. All I had to do was pose for the occasional picture in my best Bert from Sesame Street impersonation.