"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over.  A trip, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys.  It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.  A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.  And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless.  We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.  Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality the trip.  Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it.  Only then do the frustrations fall away.  In this a journey is like a marriage.  The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.  I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand. " John Steinbeck Travels with Charley.

Alaska in a sailboat? Who would have thought?  

Having traveled much of this planet, yet much more to go, I agree with John Steinbeck.  

Author and photographer, Cynthia Montagne