Pappa Hardy’s Musings on Life.

Cruising to Alaska familiarizes the cruiser with an area of water called the Inside Passage. Instead of being out on the ocean proper, you sail amidst islands and up and down Fjords. The water is calmer than the ocean, and the scenery is devastatingly beautiful. The islands, of which there are many, are pretty and green, and passage is very deep, in some places more than 1000 feet deep. This area was carved out by massive sheets of ice (glaciers) that covered this area up to 1 mile thick during the last major ice age. It is just a beautiful place on the Planet Earth.

Whenever I have gone cruising now, I feel the strong call of the seaman. I think I could have taken to a life of travel and work upon ocean going vessels. One thing that I have decided is that there is so much that I want to see around these big oceans that mark our planet, and so little time to go and do it. I am in the later parts of my life now and feel that I have run out of time to do some of the exploring and things that I really wanted to do. I wanted to be able to travel and explorer, see new things, do new things, and not be trapped in a job that has robbed me of new things. Well, I have only myself to blame. I don’t feel bad about the people that I have come to know and the family that I have, I just wish I had followed my heart more.

I loved the movie Paint Your Wagon. It of course is about the gold rush times and about how a tent city sprung up at the near mention of gold. Well, recently I had the chance to pan for gold and decided in a hurry it wasn’t worth it, even though we found a few speckles of gold dust. I guess what was even more interesting was the kind of cities the sprung up around the near mention of gold. It was interesting recently to see Skagway, the entrance to the gold fields of the early 1900s and which had such things as general stores, brothels, bars, and associated stuff. What a different world.