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A friend of mine is cruising in the South Pacific which many would think greatly preferable to Upstate New York currently, where a foot of snow fell overnight.
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It may be a challenge on wildlife, but they plough through it without fuss.
They know where to dig for buried nuts!
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So much for the ice palace.
Despite daytime warming recently, it had not totally collapsed and I’d added to it yesterday, unwilling yet to abandon my winter folly.
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Adjusting to current conditions, I’ve had to build out rather than up and I ran out of colour choices.
Perhaps it’s time to let it go!
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Beneath last night’s fall, we still had a crunchy layer of remaining snow and ice accumulated over the past 10 days.
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It was becoming troublesome to navigate safely, but the new snowfall made it less treacherous.
It will also cushion a fall!
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Our snow mountain is not really so impressive. It represents 10 days worth of ploughing from the driveway.
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When I got to the driveway this morning, I was stunned to see that it must have been cleared during the small hours of the night.
The snow pile may have deadened the sound and deflected the lights of the plough.
But it is most unusual for me not to have awakened.
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Not that I need to be awakened in the middle of the night, of course.
But strange sounds have always had that effect before.
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The South Pacific has always held appeal to me, maybe because it has been so romanticised, or perhaps just the sheer vastness of that ocean and the exquisite islands dotted about it.
Or is it simply the name Pacific?
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In early 1962, I crossed the Pacific with my mother, aboard the ms Willem Ruys, though the only island we stopped at was Pitcairn and it was not possible to go ashore.
My father had resigned his contract with UNESCO and we were returning from Asia to England, but my parents wished to avoid arriving in winter.
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Dad flew off to the States chasing some project or other, while my mother and I boarded the Willem Ruys in Penang, sailing to Sydney, Melbourne and Wellington in New Zealand, before crossing the Pacific and traversing the Panama Canal.
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The stop at Pitcairn was to pick up John Christian who claimed to be 6th generation from Fletcher.
He was a lovely, quiet man.
Now, of course, I wish I has spent hours talking to him, but I was very shy too.
What must it be like to live on such a tiny island with no other land in sight? At just over 18 square miles, it is little more than a desolate rock surrounded by a sometimes angry ocean.
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Panama, when we got there, was about the hottest place I’d ever been at that time and I remember feeling suffocated, but in the years that followed I came to recognise that feeling as one of nerves rather than something physical.
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When stressed, I’d often feel unable to fill my lungs, as if I couldn’t get a deep breath. I’ve always remembered feeling it for the first time in Panama, although I can’t recall why that would have been.
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From Panama, we sailed on to Fort Lauderdale, the first time I set foot in the USA, then on to Bermuda and finally we were to disembark in Southampton.
Because of a dock strike we finished up instead in Plymouth which was somewhat inconvenient being at the wrong end of England.
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The Willem Ruys was not my first ship. Some years earlier we’d sailed from Penang to Aden on the P & O ship ss Chitral, by today’s standards a toy boat.
Getting off in Aden had been my father’s idea, my grandfather having been there in WW1. He was curious, I suppose.
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My father was a difficult and inconsiderate man who frequently embarrassed my mother and such was the case the day we arrived in Aden.
We were the only passengers to disembark there – for good reason, it turned out – and the captain was keen to get underway as soon as possible, but father would not be rushed.
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No way he was getting out of bed early, even if it was an uncomfortable bunk! I remember the chief purser trying very hard to get us off the ship with dispatch and my father grumbling at my mother’s urging.
Once ashore, we found no such thing as a taxi. A man turned up with a cart for our baggage and walked us through the dusty streets to the hotel where he extorted a vast amount of money from my mother who dealt with such tedium.
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Mum appealed to the hotel manager who shrugged and told her she should have bargained before starting out, which was a valuable lesson to me for the future.
Within the space of about 4 hours, my father decided we’d done Aden but was then confronted with his lack of planning. He’d expected to obtain visas for Sudan, but now learned that this would take two weeks, whereas he wished to depart forthwith.
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But, he was spared the disappointment of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile and we flew instead to Egypt, on an Aden Airways haj flight via Jeddah.
It was my first experience with oversales, though at the time I of course did not realise why some passengers were standing without seats. I do remember who was removed from the aircraft, the image bedded in my brain.
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Clearing the authorities before boarding, I’d noticed the man had but a small piece of folded paper in lieu of a passport and was being treated unkindly. He clearly had little in the way of means and was clad in what looked like a grubby sheet.
When I saw him taken off and left behind, it seemed so sad and over all these years I’ve wondered if he ever got to make his pilgrimage.
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All of which is a curious tale to accompany pictures of snow in New York, in 2025.
Curious, maybe, interesting, definitely! I also had to have a look around Pitcairn on Google Maps.
Pretty but makes me glad I live in South Texas!!
Very enjoyable memories of your travels. The snow photos look lovely, but you are welcome to the snow, which I hope not to see here. Instead we have ‘miserable’. Dull, grey skies, cold winds, and light rain. It is still almost dark at 11:00 am.
Best wishes, Pete.
Your stories of travelling on a boat across oceans are fascinating. And your snow photos are beautiful – if winter can look like this here where I live, I wouldn’t mind winter.