As my mom says, rest days on this trip are a bit of a misnomer. They truly are catch-up on blogs and email days. That’s what I did yesterday. Today, I didn’t have to bike; I didn’t have to write. I didn’t have any events. This was the first true rest day of the trip. Last night, as I went to bed, I realized this. It was wonderful feeling my adrenalin subside.
We packed up our campsite and were at the ferry terminal a little after noon. The ship was scheduled to set sail at 3pm, and we were supposed to be registered and on standby to board by 1pm. We didn’t board the ship until quarter after 3, and the ship didn’t set sail until a half-hour later. The lateness didn’t matter to me, because whether I was snoozing in a reclining seat on the ship, or snoozing in our RV, I was snoozing, and that’s what I wanted to do today.
I did wake up for the ship’s safety and feature video—how to get to the lifeboats, how to put on the lifejackets, and all that. I’m totally comfortable with being in the air. Speed doesn’t scare me at all. Water has always churned my sense of comfort. I do take the Atlantic Ocean seriously. I watched the instructional video.
The safety video transitioned into a “check out how cool our boat is” video. There was all that stuff about the restaurant, reclining seat features, kids’ play area, the TVs. I was secretly laughing at the teen zone part of the video. There was a clip of an elevator door opening. Out walked a skater-style dressed teen. He scanned the room, flicked his long hair to the side, smiled, and looked somewhat in awe. A bunch of other teens were sitting around in this area listening to their headphones, and reading magazines.
I decided to forego checking in at the teen zone.
It amazes me how about 10 tractor trailers, 15-20 RVs, and a countless number of cars can fit on this boat. What amazes me more is that it floats. The boat itself is steel, and filled with hundreds of thousands of pounds of things that would plummet into the depths of any water. Really it’s amazing how far our race has come. Dump 500 steel beams into the ocean: they make a huge splash and sink. Now, take that same amount of steel and put it together in a different form; in the form of a boat: not only does it float; it holds hundreds of thousands of pounds and floats. How you get a colossal hunk of metal to move at 30km/hr across choppy water, and then navigate through a narrow rocky channel to dock is a whole other matter.
The boat that amazes me
Humanity has these complex triumphs of engineering, almost always as a result of a collaboration of ideas facilitated by communication. I think that it’s safe to say that there’s an inspiration behind every invention. Perhaps a floating log inspired someone to make one of the first boats. Perhaps a monkey sucking ants out of a hole using a rolled up leaf inspired the human use of the straw. We now pump billions of gallons of oil out of the earth with ‘straws’. The typewriter wasn’t originally intended for commercial use or business. A man invented it to help his deaf friend communicate more efficiently.
Open mindedness. Some of the best inventions were disbelieved, thought to be impossible, stupid, a waste of time. What would a world without airplanes be like? When our environments disable people, when our schools segregate, our policies act as barriers, and narrow-mindedness is the foundation of many attitudes, the sphere in which we all live is hindered from expanding.
-Skye
July 26/11
kilometresforcommunication 