Sail away, climb away

Does winter ever get you down? Do you get that shut-in feeling when the rain pelts down and the wind blows icy tendrils down your neck and into your ears?

Then it's time for a winter walk. The sun is shining between showers and my friend wants to show me a new route. Instead of carrying straight on when we reach the marina, she shows me what happens when we take a right.

The sigh of so many yachts, peacefully moored, sets me dreaming of escape. When I met my son's father, we were at university. He owned two things: a Lambretta motor scooter and an Idlealong sailing dinghy, which he kept at this very marina. That was in the old days of course, before it became a haven for luxury yachts.
I can still remember the feeling of freedom rushing through me as we hoisted the sails and harnessed the wind, letting it take us wherever we wished (and sometimes where the wind wished).

 The Auckland Council is building a walkway to the city. Walking over water is the next best thing to walking on water, as dreams of sailing waft through me like summer clouds.

I could linger here, just listening to the clunk of halyards in the wind. But my friend has a climb in mind. This means skirting around the water to a distant point in the very middle of this photo.

where we will walk on air and cross the sky. The walkway has been up for two years now, but I never knew it was there. At first I was not attracted. It looks ancient, as if constructed out of barbed wire. The brown colour is the result of an unfortunate choice,

 which probably seemed a good idea at the time. But these pretty lozenges in orange and green look old and rusty when viewed from the outside.

Time to climb. We make our way up a stairway before our walk on air, towards another stairway, which you can see across the motorway, on the left amid the trees.

 It was known as Jacob's Ladder in the past, for it was rickety and precarious, and clung to the cliff. Check it out in this link. (In naval terms, a Jacob's Ladder is portable, made of rope or metal, and used to board a ship.)

Now it shines. The name 'Jacob's Ladder' is originally biblical, referring to Jacobs vision of a ladder leading from earth to heaven. And so we climb away, into the sky, as I dream of flying into the heavens of new life.

Spring is still a wet cold month away, at least. But at least we can find little glimpses of cheeriness along the way, and in the free realm of the imagination, escape by sea or sky.