I mentioned my daughter having an adventure and then I haven’t had a chance to post about it!
This past Monday morning Ally got a text from a friend asking if there was any way she could be in Norfolk, Virginia within the next 36 hours. The tall ship Lynx was scheduled to sail from Virginia down to Georgia for the winter and needed some additional crew. I dropped Ally off at the airport at 8 o’clock that night (after driving 6 hours home from my sister’s house). When she got on the plane, she didn’t even know how she was going to get from the airport out to the ship. By the time she landed in Atlanta after her first flight, a friend of someone on the ship was arranged to meet Ally at the airport and give her a lift.
She’s having a great time. She’s mostly working at night which means she gets to see the Milky Way and amazing sunrises. So far the ship has made it down to Charleston, South Carolina where they docked ahead of a storm.
Aside: I learned of the existence of the word “noctilucent” from the auto-generated description for that last photo.
This is all possible because in the Summer of 2021 Ally signed up for a program called Two Weeks Before the Mast on the Lady Washington. The Lady Washington was built as a replica of one of the first two tall ships that sailed to the Pacific Northwest in 1787. Ally was really excited about it, but when the day came to leave she was so nervous she was in tears. I think she didn’t feel like she knew what was expected of her and if she was up for it. She went anyway. After a week and a half on the ship, they asked her to stay on longer as a paid crew member. My son (he was 16 at the time) went up and joined her for part of the summer too.
Both Ally and Sam have been back a few times.
After mentioning all this to her college advisor Mark, he ended up joining her for two weeks aboard the Lady which led to the two of them traveling up to Canada to meet with members of the Nuu-chah-nulth community to discuss the possibility of doing archaeology at the site where the original Lady Washington stopped for a while in the late 1700s.
Not letting her fear stop her from trying something new has led to such amazing adventures.
All photos in this post were taken by Ally.
