Oh, Canada. How I want to go to there.

It’s something I’m not proud to admit. It’s something that I’d rather not bring up unless asked. It’s especially disheartening because so many people I’ve met in racing are Canadians, and probably among the coolest people there are.

But yes, I’ve never been to Canada. Yet.

Unlike South Park (BELOW), I’m not going to blame Canada for my not ever being there, because, frankly, you people are waaaaaay too damn awesome to deserve blame for anything. This may, in fact, be an occasion where I’ll blame myself for not yet making it north of the border.

For all the domestic travel I’ve been fortunate enough to do in my years both as a fan and later as a media member in racing, and even for getting to twice go overseas to France for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Canada has been the biggest and most obvious unchecked place on the career or personal travel checklist.

So when I see your tweets and posts about Tim Horton’s, and beer gardens, and everything else that makes Canada so great, I get jealous. It’s not because I’m avoiding you. It’s because for some reason there’s been an invisible barrier between me and your borders that I haven’t yet been able to tear down.

There were two legitimate opportunities to go growing up, and both fell through at the last minute. Here’s a brief synopsis.

In 1998, when I was 9, I had met Michel Jourdain Jr. at Long Beach – we had both stayed on the Queen Mary hotel. Jourdain, at the time, was 22, an unappreciated “backmarker” stuck driving for Payton/Coyne Racing in a very deep CART field. Still, Jourdain became my favorite driver at the time as we exchanged letters (a novelty) and emails throughout the course of the year.

Come July, about a day or two before I was to leave for a summer break trip to Milwaukee, I got a letter from his team – an all-expenses paid trip to Toronto for that year’s race (it was, as it turned out, the fourth straight race Alex Zanardi would win that year – the true “donut king”). Plans were all in motion to make the trip, even from Milwaukee.

The day before, however, a slight problem occurred. It had nothing to do with documentation. It was, in fact, a killer fever that sidelined me and put me out of commission while already out of town. The trip didn’t happen – well, one to a doctor’s office did.

Fast forward to 2009. IndyCar’s return to Toronto after a year’s hiatus could have been the perfect opportunity to make my first voyage. The stars began to align when I was notified by my then-editor, you’re covering the Toronto IndyCar race.

Slight caveat here. You’re covering it, but from home, per budgetary reasons. Again, Canadian access denied.

The Toronto ’09 race was easily the best pure coverage chance for on site, although I’d “covered” many Canadian rounds (Montreal, Mont-Tremblant, Edmonton Champ Car/IndyCar and the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix) remotely, never had the chance to get to go.

The one full year I worked as Michelin’s blogger, in 2010, I made all the ALMS rounds of the season except for, you guessed it, Canada. In this case, the Mosport race conflicted with the day before my first day of my last year of college, and the then-maligned Internet connection and, per usual, cost, were cited as detractors from making it to Mosport.

This year was the latest in “close but no cigar to Canada” as we didn’t have anyone from our RACER team on site this year, after several were there in 2011.

So, there’s that. And it appears with Edmonton and Mosport falling this weekend, and yours truly once again not in Canada, 2012 will be the latest year to pass into the record books without yet making a trip up north.

This has to be corrected in the near future, eh? 

A few random thoughts...And it's July?!?

It’s been two months since last posting an entry, and also, IT'S ALREADY JULY?!? In the interim I turned 23, and also I decided to put fingers to keyboard and chronicle a few random thoughts racing through my brain below. Nobody likes you when you’re 23 (see below). Thoughts after the jump.

“Summeritis” – The logical extension of senioritis, “Summeritis” is where you struggle with your first full summer working post-graduation. It’s not that you’re lazy, it’s just that you’re in that transitioning phase where the whole “year since graduating” timeframe has expired and now in the working world, there are no more summer vacations. I’m hoping this is a short-term deal.

Basically every summer in college, I didn’t have any regular summer jobs to come back to, but instead had racing work as an escape – freelancing for four straight years and doing some work at school on the side. It’s now moved to a point of being all-consuming instead of just an escape, and nearly a year here into my time in California, I’m still searching for the escape that temporarily breaks up the all-racing, all-the-time mindset.

HEAT – One upside of moving to California (there’s probably more, but it hasn’t been exactly all glitz and glamor, saving that for another post) is that in O.C., we’ve been fortunate to miss the massive heat wave engulfing the country at the moment. So much of the country is over 100 degrees at the moment, and yet there’s no reason to believe in global warming. Because it’s science, and we can’t have any of that…

Higgs-boson –  … and speaking of science, this discovery was made this week, and basically it’s the “God particle” that explains how mass has mass. I’m gonna be honest – I know this thing is big, but other than that last sentence, I haven’t got the slightest idea what the hell’s going on with it. Or how to explain it. But again, science.

Andy Griffith – There’s a racing tie-in for me when it comes to Andy Griffith, who passed away this week at the age of 86. My first trip to Long Beach for the grand prix (1998), my dad and I stayed on the Queen Mary, and the old TV in the room provided my first experience of The Andy Griffith Show. It was quaint, simple and down-to-earth – three qualities that would serve modern television much better in spades rather than the morass stinking up much of the American airwaves. And also, Andy’s son in the show – Opie played by then-called Ronnie Howard – has grown into the legendary director now adding racing to his repertoire. His F1 film Rush, scheduled for a 2013 release and chronicling the 1976 World Championship bout between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, has the potential to be captivating.

Really? – I was disappointed to read the other night that Steve Nash – one the few NBA players I could bring myself to legit root for, this as I used to live in Arizona – would go to the Lakers in a sign-and-trade. To me, it’s the NBA equivalent of when Brett Favre went from the Packers to the Vikings, although that occurred after a year pit stop in New York for the Jets. Still, and I get how it’s a myth that a player can stay in one city for the entirety of his career these days, but the last place you should ever go – unless you want to throw away that entire city’s fan base’s goodwill – is your most hated rival. The Lakers are that to the Suns, other than perhaps the Spurs. Late Friday a similar move happened when it was announced Ray Allen would leave the Celtics to go to the Heat, and the reverberations will be felt of that move, as well.

“Ted” – After seeing “Men in Black 3” on my birthday, and being rather underwhelmed, it was a welcome tonic seeing Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted” last weekend. Seth has pulled off the improbable and unlikely combination of a film that’s both incredibly vulgar and heartwarmingly cute at the same time. It’s also side-splittingly funny. Bottom line, for comedy fans, it’s a must see.

Busy weekend – All of Formula 1, IndyCar, ALMS, NASCAR, NHRA and their associated support series were racing this weekend, and Grand-Am is testing at Indianapolis. All of this made for a home-bound and very busy TDZ monitoring all the activity and focusing on IndyCar and ALMS coverage. Additionally, it marks a weekend not at either Toronto or Lime Rock, and either would have been fun to get to. C’est la vie.

Onward and upward from here. Out for now. Cheers.