I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving break and had feasts of
epic proportions. I went back to Dallas over the holiday to spend time with
friends and family, but instead of telling you some boring tale about
Thanksgiving dinner I thought I would go in a different direction today.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was a fairly typical day which
involved me doing very little besides helping my sister prepare food for the
following day. And even in this instance of cooking, my main contribution
involved eating everything, or as I like to call it: taste testing. About mid-afternoon
I went to pick up a friend from work. The day was beautiful and since I had
been eating for most of it I felt the time was right for a nice jog.
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| Through the beautiful city |
When I arrived to get my friend, before I could ask about running I
was greeted with this question: “you want to go kayaking?” Judging by her
reaction to my reaction, I must've looked like I didn't want to go. In my defense, I
had my mind on other plans, and it took a few minutes to readjust my thinking.
It’s kind of like missing your turn with a navigation system, it just takes a
moment for everything to change to the new setting. So after some initial
wavering on my part we started loading the kayak.
This is where things started to get interesting. The kayak seated
two people and was fairly long. The vehicle we had was a 4-door Chevy Cobalt.
Automobile aficionados will probably notice this is not a large vehicle. No
matter, we threw that kayak on top and tied it down to anything we could find.
After 30 minutes of wrangling we finally had everything in place all the while
praying fervently that the roof didn’t turn into a floor by collapsing.
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| Nothing odd about that at all. |
After that little adventure all we had to do was drive through
Dallas to get to White Rock Lake which literally sits just east of downtown. If
you want to get some strange looks just drive through Dallas in a small car
with a bright red kayak attached to the roof. You will stand out, perhaps if we
could’ve disguised the kayak with a cowboy hat then no one would have noticed. After
all this we didn’t get to the lake until around 5:15 which in Dallas means you
have about 30 minutes of daylight left. Now it was my friends turn to waver on
whether or not we should go ahead with the plan, but I had already changed my
mind once and was therefore unable to do so again.
If you want a cool experience then being on a calm lake at sunset
will always qualify. The panorama was great, and we had the lake to ourselves
because nobody else was crazy enough to head out for kayaking in the dark. After
a few minutes we learned how to row in unison and work as a team which is much
better for propelling a craft through water. If you want to work on you
relationship with others, then just go out in a two person kayak. Afterwards you
will either have an unshakable bond or hate each other for life.
Next week is the last post of the year, I’ll be back in January
for the start of school. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving… even if it
wasn’t as cool as mine
