Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

    I whine quite a bit about getting older. There isn't a whole lot about attaining the "golden years" that I find very golden. Maybe they're called that because all the gold you might have been lucky enough to accumulate when you were working is now spent on medicine and doctor visits. There is one very good thing though about being retired, and that is, while everyone else is out trying to make a living, I have time to go to some of the places that others can't access during the week because they're at work. This past Friday, Jan and decided to take advantage of the beautiful fall weather and take a drive out to Freshwater Bay. It's located down Chatham Strait, and if I were to take my boat down there, it would take me at least six hours to get there. By road it's only 28 miles. Even so, it still took us the better part of two hours. There is a lot of loose gravel and pot holes, to say nothing of multiple blind curves and hill...

  This past weekend was absolutely gorgeous. Sunday was the kind of fall day that you want to imprint on your memory and drag out in the middle of January when yet another winter storm is raging and the landscape is covered in snow. I grabbed up Jan and Jen and we took a ride out to False Bay, a delightful little spot down Chatham Strait. We passed over the Spasski River and saw a number of Humpies  enjoying their last hurrah. They were looking pretty washed up, with large splotches of rotting flesh on their bodies and tails all tattered. We were hoping to see some bears or deer, but the only other wildlife that showed themselves were a number of daring squirrels that dashed across the road in front of the truck. It wasn't too much of a feat actually; the truck was unable to pick up speed from the bridge all the way out to False Bay. We couldn't travel twenty feet without running in to a pot hole, and usually not just one, but a whole succession of them. It w...