More Visitors to Tacoma

If you’re talking sheer beauty, sheer poetic grace, I think this is my favorite ship of the Tall Ships visiting Tacoma this weekend as I love the lines of the sails with their subtle variation and repetition:

Personally, though, I still prefer some Northern visitors who seem to be spending the whole summer:

Tall Ships Visit Tacoma

Gavin and I spent several hours yesterday waiting for the Tall Ships to go pass on Ruston Way in Tacoma yesterday. Gavin desperately wanted to see the Pirate ship, the one that appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean, and I didn’t want to disappoint him despite the fact that I’ve hated any kind of parade ever since Vietnam and I hate crowds almost more than I hate parades, though the two seem nearly inseparable.

Anyway, I decided that rather than fighting the awful traffic that we’d park at the top of the bluff and walk down about a mile or a mile and a half to the beach. We reached the beach in remarkably good humor about fifteen minutes before the boats were supposed to start.

An hour and a half later, bored out of his mind, Gavin begged to leave without having seen a single boat. Despite his extended moaning and cajoling I refused to leave without seeing at least one tall ship, and it was a sight to behold:

We got to see more than one, but still ended up leaving long before the parade finished. It was a rather unpleasant hike back up the cliff, with Gavin complaining much of the way. Personally, I’m still amazed at how people romanticize these ships. Though I’ll admit that they are much prettier than modern ships, life aboard these ships was generally abysmal, as anyone who’s studied Northwest history should know. After all, they didn’t have to shanghai sailors because life aboard these ships was such a delight.