In the past, I have sometimes used the Friday Five to break the logjam when I was having trouble motivating myself to post something to this blog. Friday Five, if you don’t remember, was a website that posted a set of five questions — usually all related to a single topic — for people to answer on their blogs. But the person who ran Friday Five shut it down last year. However, bloggers who found the site useful have refused to let the idea die, and one of them has created FridayQ to fill the void.
This week’s FridayQ questions are about distance. And yes, I know I was supposed to answer them on Friday. Do you want a blog post or don’t you?
FQ1: What’s the furthest north you’ve been on this world? What were you doing there? Glens Falls, New York, where I visited a longtime penpal in 1977.
FQ2: What’s the furthest south you’ve been on this world? What were you doing there? Florida. I visited the Orlando area and Kennedy Space Center in 1976.
FQ3: Where were you born, and what’s the furthest you’ve been from that spot? I was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana. I guess Glens Falls is the farthest from there that I have ever traveled.
FQ AWAY: Name a blog you read that’s the most distant from you… whether it be emotionally, culturally, religiously, or by physical location. Gauging emotional, cultural, or religious difference sounds too hard, so I’m going to stick with the physical. Of the blogs that I read regularly, the winner has to be Tim Blair‘s. He lives in Australia. It’s hard to get much farther from North Carolina without leaving the surface of the Earth. (If my calculations are correct, my actual antipodal point is in the Indian Ocean some distance west of Australia.)
FridayQ doesn’t ask about east or west, but I’ll answer those anyway. My personal western extreme is Nevada, where my family visited some national parks in 1968. My eastern extreme is Boston, where I attended the 1989 Worldcon.
You may notice that all of the trips I mention here were many years ago; the most recent (to Boston) took place when my son Ben (who will soon turn 16) was an infant. This is not a coincidence. Becoming a parent tends to drastically reduce the amount of time and money that one can devote to travel. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.