Death and destruction will always find you, no matter where you are.

Winter has fucked off. Hurray!

The snow has been rapidly melting over the last two weeks and with warmer days and temperatures still below freezing at night, the melt has been reasonably slow, so the chances of a huge flood like has happened in the past has been reduced. Even the ice tower has collapsed snd is now just a pile of ice stones on eth front lawn - Reminiscent of a collapsed old stone wall you would find surrounding a field in the Lake District.

All the talk of floods just a few weeks after all the talk was of temperatures colder than Mars started me thinking rubbish as normal and as normal, I am going to pass on my rubbish thoughts here on eth worst blog ever.

You see, people think of Winnipeg as a horrible, cold place in winter and wonder why anyone would ever live there. Then in summer its though of as a horrible hot place, with mosquitoes that will bite your knob off and spit the remains in your face before biting you over and over again until you resemble the pimpled face of an overactive teen who doesn’t like showers.

But I have thought about all of this over the last few years and over the last 2 minutes since I started writing this poop and its all bollocks. Yeah, Winnipeg IS actually like that, but apart from those shit things and the shit drivers and the fact that the nearest salt water ocean is about 3000 miles away, there isn’t much else to worry about here.

When I was travelling to Australia on a bus, the group I was with came across much worse things. We missed two volcanic eruptions in Indonesia by two weeks – one was before we got there and one after.

Being shown a map of the blast area

Clearing the dust

another volcano

When we travelled south through Thailand we saw floods everywhere, including staying in a hotel that had opened especially for us, even though the ground floor had only been drained that morning.

In Koh Samui we had to walk through 2 feet of water to get to the 5-star hotel whose underground car garage was 8 feet deep in water. That was ok though as the bar wasn’t flooded and stayed dry all day until we got so drunk we started to knock over bottles of booze!

The hotel we stayed in that had been flooded that morning

the clear up outside

In New Zealand we were just a day away from being involved in the Christchurch earthquake of 2011. This was just a few weeks after more floods engulfed us one the East coast of Australia and sharks were seen in the river in central Brisbane. Just two weeks later and few hundred miles north I had to get a rental car to drive 3000 miles to Melbourne to escape Cyclone Yasi as it hit the coast near Townsville. Of course, when I arrived in Melbourne, that too had some floods.

A very wet kangaroo in Australia

Floods at australia zoo - the crocs were close to escaping

The shark infested river in Brisbane

The weirdest was when driving though the outback we came across a plague of locusts so thick we had to stop driving to clean the bodies from the front of the bus.

Australia is a wonderful place with great weather and that’s good, because if it didn’t have nice weather, then I am sure that a lot of people wouldn’t go there – because of the spiders and snakes that want to kill you on the land and the jellyfish and sharks that want to kill you in the sea.

In Florida, you can’t cross the road without being eaten by an alligator or being hit by a falling citrus fruit. They also have some wicked storms there and, yes, I have been in one there too.

I also sat with a tramp (Homeless person) in a park in Chicago once while watching a huge thunderstorm streak lightning across the skies and one bolt hit the ground just a hundred metres or so in front of us.

My drunken mate in Chicago  - waiting under a tree for the storm to pass

Basically, what I am trying to say is – the whole world is out to kill you. Its amazing that more people don’t get hit my mother fucker nature more often. If the worst thing about Winnipeg is a slippy sidewalk because the melting snow has frozen into a puddle or the tiny midges that give you a slight itch when they bite you whilst cooking a barbecue in the garden, then I am happy. I might not be able to swim in the sea all year around, but I can skate on the river, swim in over 100,000 lakes or eat at restaurants from over 400 countries. Yes, I know there aren’t 400 countries in the world, but that’s how diverse Winnipeg really is!

I do miss the rain from Manchester though. Sometimes, when the weather is right, and the rain falls, you get that smell that you just don’t get anywhere else (Not the sewage works in Partington.) We do get some rain in Winnipeg and once it was the right temperature and just heavy enough to give me that feeling of being back in Manc. I will take that!