Windjammer cruise combines best elements.

For the last 20 years I've fantasized about taking a Windjammer cruise--to just about anywhere.

In the 1980s when I edited the Wisconsin Tavern League's magazine called Top Shelf, we'd often fill advertising pages with camera-ready ads for the trips. It was supposed to be a tradeout--us trading an otherwise empty page for a discount on a cruise--but nobody ever went.

Imagine a four-mast wooden ship, powered by 15 huge, white, triangular sails, that takes about a hundred passengers and half that number of crew to warm islands surrounded by that special tropical blue-green sea. There sun and warm sand would wash away the stress of life and livelihood, and Wisconsin's lingering winter.

In the back of my mind I've kept these visions and pondered them in my heart. Last month I experienced them.

Blame it on the Internet

In fall my older brother sent me an email about reconnecting by email with an old girlfriend. Of course I remembered the name but didn't recall meeting her. As a 10-year-old I was more interested in bicycles and softball, while he was a hormonal 16-year-old constantly discussing his many girlfriends.

Over the fall and winter months the emails between them turned into phone calls, and the phone calls turned into planning a meeting and vacation together, 50 years after their first love. She lives in Key West and he lives in California, so they agreed to meet at her place, then take an island cruise together in the Caribbean. Darned if they didn't choose a Windjammer!