The Shetland Way: A Journey to the Far North From A to Z: Adventure B
From A to Z:
Adventure Beyond Plan B
During the pandemic, you could not just have a Plan B. You needed the rest of the alphabet. We took Plan S: Shetland, then Fair Isle — Britain’s most remote inhabited island.
Shetland, Fair Isle, and the Art of Flexibility
During the Pandemic, you can’t just have a Plan B. How about the rest of the alphabet? We took Plan S: Shetland and Britain’s most remote inhabited island — Fair Isle.
Note: not “Shetlands.” The Vikings clearly thought of Shetland as a land.
A pandemic-era dispatch from Shetland and Fair Isle.
Not Just Magellan. Regular People Count Too.
It is very important that expedition history not be distilled to just those great men and women like Magellan, Edmund Hillary, Lewis and Clark, and others, but to the regular folk — like Sarah and Ed — who go out to do their own exploring and circumnavigation of the Earth and then blog about it: literature in a hurry.
I love writing but hate the paperwork, so I take a lot of photos and videos. Show rather than tell.
A life measured in ports, weather windows, and the stories that follow.
This doesn’t seem like a big deal — travel is an activity, not an accomplishment — until global travel stops. Then it becomes risky, rare, and meaningful. But that has not stopped us before. If anything, it makes the travels more significant because spontaneous motion has become harder to execute.
Planning Is Everything. The Plan Means Nothing.
Our motto is: Planning is everything but the plan means nothing. In other words, it is situational. We already had our flight cancelled to the USA that week and rebooked with BA. Your best ability these days is flexibility.
Documenting these travels with pictures has the added advantage of being true. You have to tolerate contradictions and see things from different perspectives. We really did travel around the world seven times, and we have the evidence — archived on Facebook, Instagram, Blogger, and YouTube.
Couldn’t take Sarah on this adventure in Afghanistan in 2019.
No Matter Where I Go, There I Am.
No matter where I go, there I am. I can still look up at the same moon and stars, albeit from a different hemisphere. It innately belongs to all of us, children of this planet. I am stricken by what poet Diane Ackerman calls “the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else” — Cosmic Pastoral.
When your future version of you gets involved in the present version of you to get to better decisions, your life takes on a new optimal perspective. You release your emergency brake, and when you land, things start to take off. When you truly feel the emotions of the future, add gratitude, and it is as if you have already signed for it.
People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.
Edmund Hillary
The Long Game: One Port at a Time
We rarely see the incremental baby steps behind enormous outcomes. But deserving enormous outcomes is mostly the result of small steps. The art and science of achievement is turning the invisible into something visible.
State it and create it: I want to travel around the world was the mantra I told myself every day as far back as I can remember. How did I do it? One port at a time, mostly by sea.
Direction
Speed is useless if the bearing is wrong.
Decision
You cannot make progress without making bets under uncertainty.
Luck
Luck is part of the route. Preparation decides what you do with it.
Shetland, Alaska, Hawaii, Norway: Different Rocks, Same Ocean Lesson.
Shetland reminds me of Alaska: a frontier outpost feeling combined with the Ohana-Aloha islands of Hawaii. Different climates, for sure, but basically a bunch of rocks in the middle of an ocean — and a lack of superlatives to describe the savage beauty. Add Norway too, because you somatically feel the Viking vibe here in Shetland.
For context, there are two videos below: one of Ketchikan, Alaska — the rainiest place in North America — and the other of midsummer in Norway at the top of the world in the Arctic Circle.
Ketchikan, Alaska — the rainiest place in North America.
Midsummer in Norway — the Arctic Circle.
The ship stopped. The question did not.