Cruise Day 4

December 26th - Grenada Island
(written December 27th)

Grenada. I should have stayed in town...

Well, I didn't feel much like blogging yesterday. Want to know why? Here's some Lee Gardner trivia with which you can amuse and impress your friends. I flippin' hate canoes. I was a Boy Scout for most of my minor years. I completed a total of 4, yes count them, *4* merit badges (I'll explain that whole saga some other day...) Anyway, one of them was for canoing, so that on the off chance that I ever jumped out of a plane and landed in a canoe (because I would never get into one voluntarily) I could at least scramble back to shore. As far as I'm concerned, completing that merit badge was for survival purposes only. And like many other survival training exercises, it was awful and emotionally scarring. I remember in high school these fresh military recruit guys would come back from Boot Camp and talk about horrible stuff like mustard gas training and bunker drills. And I was all like, "Pfft, Back in 8th grade I had to portage a full size aluminum canoe BY MYSELF." Yeah, that shut them up pretty quick.

So when my sister suggested kayaking on Grenada, I was like, "Sure! I've never been in a kayak before!" In the guidebook, all the day-trips all have little code pictures to describe the outings and this one had the 'Light Activity-Family Oriented' symbol next to it. That should have been my first clue. But, you know, I've been, like, working out and stuff and had just conquered the Wall, so I was feeling pretty virile and stuff... It wasn't until later that I realized that 'kayak' is the Eskimo word for 'cheap plastic canoe.'

I've tried to blot most of it out of my memory, but here's the basics... We should have known that things were going to be rocky when an 18 passenger tour bus came to pick up the 24 of us. When we finally all got to the boat launch, Dad and I figured we'd get a two seater instead of both going solo. The plan is to row out to a beach on an adjacent island, hang out for an hour, then come back. No problem, we could see that the island wasn't that far away. So we hop in, and right away, my Father who has had a lifetime of back issues, finds that his seat cushion is misaligned. The problem is it's pretty much impossible to make any kind of effective adjustment to a seat behind your back, with a life preserver on, while you're sitting on it floating in the water. Mine was fine so I didn't even think about it until he couldn't hardly sit up at all. All I knew was that from the get go if my paddle wasn't in the water, we were going backwards. My psyche can handle it if I'm not making 'progress' but I get reeeally frustrated knowing that every second I'm 'resting' it's going to cost me X number of extra strokes just to get back where I started. Anyway, yes, the wind was against us right from the start. Then we turned a corner, and the wind was still against us. Then we turned another corner and the wind was STILL against us. And that's when I snapped and called for help. There was no way we were going to make it around the last corner (which reportedly had the strongest winds and current.) We weren't the only ones who got stranded, there were at least 8 of us who had to be towed back in. On the return trip, we came back exactly the way we went out so I could see that we did indeed cover lots of water, we just didn't make it to the beach. So we spent the better part of the afternoon on 'the wrong' beach waiting for the rest of the kayakers to come back. But really, is there ever a wrong beach to be stuck on in the Caribbean?

So after talking to our guides, it turns out this was a fairly new excursion and that you can get to the beach by either going clockwise or counter-clockwise around the island (makes sense.) But one way is too short for hardcore kayakers and the other way is too long for us recreational types. They also claimed to have taken the wind into account when determining which route to go, but that it shifted after everyone rounded the first corner. *I* think it wouldn't have mattered. Upwind is upwind regardless of which side of the island you're on. Anyway, we survived with some generally unused and now overworked and cranky muscles and mostly just a bruised ego.

When we met up with my mother later her response was, "Don't you know you should never get in a canoe with your Father?" We laughed, but not because it was that funny. It was that 'bonded through peril' kind of laugh.

The worst part about the kayaking trip is that it nearly overshadowed the beauty of Grenada. The weather was amazing that day and we decided that the breeze would have been perfect for doing pretty much anything but paddling.

As a total nonsequitor, to get to the boat launch, we took a tour bus through town. It's always interesting to see what's different and what's been totally Americanized on these islands, but I had to laugh when we passed 'The Office of the Leader of the Opposition' (that's exactly what the sign said) and then half a block up was the Peace Corp building.