I started writing this in 2024, eighteen years after these events. The more I wrote, the more I realised how different the world is now than it was back in the Mid Noughties. I travelled England in the summer of 2006. Three years before my Wwoofing adventures of Canada, which you can find out about in my book 'Wwoofing Eh?'. This journey, however, was a very different travel experience, most notably because it was my first. 2006 was a summer that embraced a heatwave, which worked out well for me because it gave me some lovely weather, especially in the first half of my journey. The mobile phone had also yet to evolve into a smartphone. Digital cameras were the "in" thing, as were iPods, even though I still favoured the portable CD player. Such differences meant I couldn't take endless photos, some of them were blurry and there was no social media to upload them onto either. There were no selfie sticks, no one taking a photo or video of something constantly. I feel like my journey around England was near the end of an era in society and how people travelled. I had my rucksack on my back and a cool Samsung flip phone in one pocket and a digital camera in the other. The fact that my super cool flip phone failed me during my journey does not affect my point. I was rather miffed by it too, such things as the Cloud or Google photos didn't exist. Everything on it was gone, for good. This included a photo of me and my brother with the hilarious writer, Danny Wallace, a man who influenced me greatly when it came to travelling. I wrote a diary as I travelled, but didn't necessarily note down every factual detail of my two month journey. I did, at least take plenty of photos, so, I think I can cobble enough of it together to make sense. Or at least skim over the parts that I can't.
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