Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  A few weeks back I was coming home from church when I noticed this unusual craft anchored in the bay off of Graveyard Island. I didn't know if it was a submarine, a boat or what. I was surprised a week or so later when I saw the same boat on the Anchorage news. It is named simply, A. According to the Sun Sentinel it is owned by a Russian billionaire  who named it after himself (Andrey Milnechenko, and his super model wife, Aleksandra. It is reported to be 394 feet long and having a price tag of a cool $300 million. I can think of other ways to spend $300,000,000.00. That's just the initial cost. As the owner of a boat that initially cost me a cool $16,000.00 I can promise, that no matter how much you spend on a boat, it will just be the beginning of sorrows. The difference between him and me is that he can afford to make the repairs. Oh, he may be a billionaire now, but by the time he gets done owning the boat, he'll most likely be in debt to some shipyard or anoth...

It's good to be home. For those of you who have never traveled in Southeast Alaska before, you don't know what you're missing. We had to be at the ferry terminal an hour before departure, which was supposed to be at 9:45 PM. We joined a whole slug of other cars, trucks, shipping vans and boats and waited. The ferry had to take on fuel, so that delayed the process by about an hour or so. When we finally got on board, we found a spot in the lounge and sat down. The chairs are supposed to recline, and they do up to a point. That point being the most uncomfortable position that you could ever hope to try and sleep in. Jan opted to try and sleep on the floor, which is just steel plates covered with a thin layer of carpet. I can only liken it to sleeping on the floor of a produce cooler. The upside is, there were no little kids running around and screaming as is usually the case on the smaller ferry. I could kick myself for not grabbing the four inch foam mattress that I had boug...