The beauty of having a journey that is both discordant and verging on macaronic verse, is you can add any number of extra helpings. One portion-verse crossed Canada from salt-gulf to salt-river, a neat C2C, from Victoria to Quebec City, along a greater part of the Trans-Can highway. However, that same road carries on; no ‘Tierra Finisterre’ signage in Quebec, for there’s the small problem of the Atlantic provinces to the east that will need to be accommodated.

Why stop at there? The geology of the Canadian Maritimes is Torridonian sandstone, which makes Appalachia, the Gaspé and Ben Alligin all one mountain chain, albeit one rendered asunder a few eons ago by some drifting plate tectonics. Of course Iceland, the Faroes and Shetland lie in between, so would probably require inclusion.

Tierra del Fuego to East Lothian, Ushuaia to Haddington. Land’s End to Front Door.

Facts and Problems: Cape Horn is as far south as Haddington is north, which leads inevitably to consideration of a visit to the other far north, and Norway’s Nordkapp.

However, these are but speculative musings and lie in a speculative future. More immediately we’re off on a cruise. Going cruising.

A verb I wasn’t sure should ever be attached to myself. I’ve looked on those slab sided, stack-windowed, floating hulks and thought ‘prison ship’. More for their graceless lines and want of elegance than a snobbish indifference to cultural fact.

Part of our northern journey included a ferry crossing off the northern cape of Vancouver Island. The boat threading its way through a tangle of passages, straits and channels, passing logging rafts, bald eagles and sliding on a mirror glass sea.

The northern ‘Inside Passage”.

So in a collaboration of symmetry, if there’s a similar ‘inside passage’ to be navigated in the south, we want, need, to sail it.

It will be different. No bald eagles, no sleeping on deck, no serene passage for a purple-magenta wind is forecast. The Navigator has already purchased the seasick tablets.