New Orleans   Getting ready to fly to Japan, Korea, and then Canada, I find myself watching Yukon Men and  Alaska:  The Last Frontier on the Discovery Channel on the elliptical machine at the gym.  I find these shows magnetic in their own way.  I can do without the endless father-son baloney, but they are not hokey and repetitive like Swamp People, but more like my former favorite of this genre, Pimp Your Ride, they actually teach you stuff.

Admittedly, I don’t do much snowmobiling in Louisiana, but I like knowing that you can hydroplane over wet spots as the snow melts.  I moved an Airstream to Montana, but now that seems like nothing compared to pushing a log cabin 4 miles down a dirt road on logs of various shapes and sizes you cut down yourself.  I want my own power saw winch, and I want it now!

The best vacation my family ever had was 2 weeks in Alaska camping, fishing, and ogling everything some years back when you could actually cash in 100,000 frequent flyer miles and all four of you could go.  I always wanted to go back, but….

As more of us spent more and more of our time from city to city, keeping a skill set and developing more is harder.  I wonder if the attraction of all of these shows isn’t the pure exotic nature of finding something foreign right up the road in Louisiana or just north in Canada and Alaska?

More interesting to me is the fact that this is simply another way of problem solving where ingenuity counts when there are no other options.   In that way it teaches us all!