So yesterday I went kayaking. I love kayaking for many reasons. The primary one being that you know that feeling you get when you realize something unexpectedly cool is happening. Maybe the day starts off kind of blah and you are pretty much doing the same old same old and then a friend calls you to go out with them and you get a bit buzzed but not too bad and later on you do a one am run to the all night supermarket and get the stuff for s'smores along with baby carrots and exotic juice drinks which you intend on mixing with the vodka or rum but kind of just forget about it and just throw stuff into the fire, and when you think think about the boring run of the mill part of the day it seems ages ago, and that kind of makes the whole thing seem cooler.
Well, kayaking for me is like that. I live in Massachusetts, but I don't live in the particularly cool part. I live twenty minutes inland, which is okay, but you probably couldn't tell where I live apart from Michigan. I don't live in Boston, I don't live down the Cape, I don't live in the mountains. I live in the part where people live if they need to conveniently live kind of close to those places but don't want to deal with the possibility of not having an all night supermarket or worry about road construction being insane enough to kill you. It's a nice place to live and grow up in and I wouldn't want to leave here to move to the countless other places around the country that are convenient but not particularly interesting. Kayaking makes me feel like all those places you see in travel magazines that make you think everyone goes on vacations with hiking boots instead of their loosest jeans aren't really that exotic and are actually pretty accessable.
You look up places on line to kayak and the place I went to yesterday was fifteen minutes away, but I would have never knew it existed. There were all sorts of crazy inlets to explore and mazes of sawgrass. I saw a bunch of birds and some wildlife and what I swear is a UFO.
Unfortunately (or, considering this is allegedly a health blog, fortunately) one of the kayaks we use had a leak in it, and so the friend we went with has a two person kayak, so I took the single person working kayak intentionally, figuring I'd get a better work out and work my arms and torso more if I didn't have someone else to rely on. Alas, this pretty much meant I was constantly paddling for three hours to keep up. I was so tired yesterday afterwards that a few hours afterwards, after I showered, I decided that I didn't like the shirt I was wearing, but was too tired to make the effort to take one t-shirt off and put another one on.
I hope no crazy rowers will read this blog, or else they'd be thinking "Three hours! Pah! I could do that hung over in twenty foot waves with a malfunctioning paddle!"
But yeah, it was definitely an awesome day. Plus I only got a hint of a sunburn and a few bug bites on my heal. Score. At least I hope they are bug bites. At one point we got out of the kayaks to swim for a few minutes and I'm not a fan of swimming in places where I can't see anything. I'd suck at midnight skinny dipping. But anyway, I swear my foot touched something and I know I saw at least a horseshoe crab (it was a saltwater river). It could have been a sting ray or a man-o-war. If you don't hear from me, assume I've gone into shock and in a hospital.
That's another point for where I live. Convenient access to excellent hospitals, which presumably can rescue one from jelly fish attack.
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