As I have just about recovered from the jet lag (and the stomach upset I picked up and the mosquito bites) I’d like to share with you a few insights I’ve picked up over the past two and a half weeks.

1)      New York City in late July can be insanely hot.

2)      The bed bug epidemic in NYC’s hotels has not reached the Hilton on East 42^nd Street.

3)      The best Mexican food in the entire universe is served at Pampano on East 49^th Street.

4)      Grand Central Station is a total gem and the people who wanted to tear it down in the 1970’s must have been raving mad.

5)      Central Park is a little slice of paradise.

6)      The Museum of Natural History is superb and also has a planetarium display with a voiceover by Whoopi Goldberg that’s just fabulous.

7)      The Staten Island ferry is a great way to travel.

8)      The view from the top of the Empire State Building is fabulous. The view at Ground Zero is, in direct contrast, depressing as hell.

9)      Three days is not enough time to even start to scratch the surface of NYC, but is enough to discover that Donald Trump has the artistic and architectural sensibilities of a concussed mollusc.

10)  US micro breweries are brilliant, but sorry guys the best Guinness in the world is still served in Dublin. The Irish hoard it, the bastards.

11)  LaGuardia is the oddest airport I’ve ever been in, but I’m still not sure why.

12)  Toronto is fabulous and we’re going to retire to Canada one day because we both love the country so much as it’s like the US but with more sanity and less shrillness. And a total absence of Sarah Palin, which is refreshing.

13)  Waterford in Ontario is a bit isolated but we found a great B&B there. Ok, it’s the only B&B there, but it was still great as we stayed in a cottage with everything that we needed.

14)  My step-adopted grandkids… wait that’s too cumbersome. Um, my step-daughter’s kids… oh crap, my grandkids are great.

15)  My grandson Briar and the rest of his team take their football (sigh… ok, call it soccer) very seriously.

16)  The Parker Bros. game Polyanna needs to be brought back into production by those short-sighted idiots as it’s a seriously fun game. Evil too.

17)  Canada’s Wonderland blows away every other amusement park I’ve ever been in. The view from the top of the Drop Tower is great, even though you only get to see it for a few seconds before it all gets very blurry. The Behemoth is a seriously scary ride though and I now know that I have a fully functioning set of lungs. Oh yeah and the kids got to go on a few rides as well. The Spongebob Squarepants one is very odd. Fun, but the last time I felt a chair gyrate like that I had food poisoning.

18)  It is a very bizarre feeling to swim in Lake Erie and realize that you can’t see the other side but this isn’t the sea.

19)  Standing on the glass floor at the top of the CN Tower and looking down gives you a very unpleasant feeling.

20)  Creemore is one of the best beers in the world, yum.

21)  Wearing a blue plastic poncho on the Maid of the Mists as you approach the Horseshoe Falls at Niagara makes you feel like you’re wearing a giant condom. Keeps you dry though as you gape at the amazing sights.

22)  I will one day see the memorial to General Sir Isaac Brock at Queenston Heights. The only reason we missed seeing it is that we didn’t see the right bloody exit.

23)  Chapters is a very cool place to shop at as it has enough books to appease even me.

24)  Running around with a nerf gun and trying to hit a giggling 7-year-old with no tactical sense at all is a lot of fun. Tiring but fun.

25)  Fishing is oddly relaxing.

26)  Watching my son-in-law run off to the fire station to join his fellow volunteers on a fire alarm call (who in their right minds would burn garbage next to a field of corn stubble on a hot and windy day?) can be very stressful.

27)  My daughter in law may have been adopted by my wife and her useless ex-husband, but she is scarily like Kathleen in soooo very many ways!

28)  Parents need medals for surviving their kids birthday parties. Seriously, how do they manage it all?

29)  When someone tells you that a pepper is really hot, take their word for it and don’t try it to see what it’s like. Turning red and sweaty and going looking for the milk indoors is not fun at all.

30)  It is seriously unfair that the Food Channel in the US & Canada has so many cool programmes that haven’t made it over to the UK yet. Chefs vs City is a lot of fun, even though the rhyming clues make me want to throw things at the screen. And how can Top Chef Washington DC be about to hit the screens when we only had Season Five (new York) this year???

31)  Leaving family at the end of an amazing holiday is tough. Being described as ‘Patricia’s parents’ also gets me curiously emotional. Ahem – me man! Not get all, erm, moist-eyed! Grrr…

32)  Sandals and mosquito bites are an unpleasant combination.

33)  If you work with a Boston Red Sox fan whose reaction to my tale of woe for the weekend when Tiggy had to have his blood taken by us and tested due to his diabetes was “Stop right there – it’s just a cat!”, then the best thing you can buy on holiday is a large Yankees mug – and then sit at your desk and drink coffee from it ostentatiously when you return.