Romantic Adventures

When I imagine Dan and I having a date night, I imagine us getting dressed up and walking down to the beach to something like this....

But the truth and reality is the only time we dress up is for church, and we don't consider a date successful unless there is some sort of adventure or risk involved. Consider the time we biked Cade's Cove in Tennessee. We biked thirteen miles and saw about a dozen black bears. The incident that stands out most is when a momma and her three cubs crossed the road in front of us. The momma thought we were a little too close to her babies and started walking towards us encouraging us in bear language to "back off." We obliged. I was trying to video the whole thing while backing away on my bike rather quickly. She kept coming towards us and we, of course, kept backing away. Later when we viewed my proudly taken video, it looked like one of those Big Foot sighting videos where you are not sure if the person holding the video camera is videoing the sky, the ground, or the trees. There's usually not even a Big Foot in sight, or at least not an identifiable one. I guess I lose my cool (and my video skills) when a momma bear is chasing me. 

The next year we biked Dogwood Canyon in Missouri. This is a fabulous place with creeks, waterfalls and beautiful vegetation. But, when we left we felt indifferent about the whole event. Something was missing. I looked at Dan and asked, "What was missing, why didn't it feel like a great date?." "Bears," he said, "Bears chasing us." That was it. There was no adventure. 

So.....this spring when we were in Florida, instead of having a romantic meal on the beach like the beautiful picture above ☝ we opted for kayaking in the ocean. 

Our adventure started when I bought a voucher online from Bob, the kayak guy. He was a little hard to get ahold of, but he assured us our adventure was all set. We were supposed to be at the kayak shop at 9:00 on a Friday morning. Forgetting about Florida traffic, we were running a little late and arrived about 9:15. No one was there. We knocked. Nothing. We rang the bell. Nothing. "You better call," Dan said to me. I dialed up Bob, who surprisingly answered his phone. "Um, we had an appointment for 9:00 to take a kayak out on the bay," I said. "Oh, I had to run some errands so I stuck your kayak out on the beach," Bob replied. "Ok.... " I stammered. "We're just supposed to go for it?" "Yes, it's all sitting on the beach," Bob said with a lot more confidence than I was feeling. We hung up, and I turned to Dan, "Our kayak is on the beach, and we're just supposed to go for it." 

We found said kayak down by an area of oyster beds. I have never seen oyster beds before, so I didn't realize what we were looking at. "Look at all these cool shells!" I squealed. I'm pretty easily entertained. So while Dan was trying to get the kayak in the water  I was walking all over the poor oyster bed looking for shells.

Dan complains often when we kayak together that he does all the work. I don't think that this is a fair assessment though, because I do pack the cooler. I also occasionally yell, "PADDLE FASTER" when there is something I really want to see. 

I climbed in the kayak and we began our adventure. I had read reviews online that people had seen dolphins, manatee, and sting rays in this particular bay - on top of the birds in the mangroves, and we were hoping to see all of it. 

We started our journey off in the mangroves, which are small trees that grow in the water and along the shore. (I've included this short description because I had no idea before we went.) The branches are very unique, and the water where they grow is extremely shallow. It was so  beautiful kayaking along this area. The water was crystal clear, and the shells were abundant. I wanted to bring back some of the bigger shells we were seeing, but we wanted to be careful not to collect ones with living creatures still in them. 

As we, um I mean Dan, was paddling along I saw the most perfectly white spiral shell about two feet down in the water. "Stop!" I yelled. It's actually hard to stop a moving kayak in the water, but Dan's pretty amazing so he started paddling backwards. "What is it?" he said. "That shell. I want to take it home to the kids," I said as I pointed in the water behind us. Dan dutifully paddled back and reached into the water with his long arms and pulled up the most perfect shell. It was beautiful. He handed it up to me in the front of the boat. I started to turn it over as I was admiring how perfectly shaped it was. As I turned it, all of the sudden a "creature" jumped out of the opening in the shell and landed on my leg. I did what any self respecting woman would do and screamed while hurling the shell without it's "creature" back into the water. "What are you doing?" Dan asked me incredulously. "I just got that for you!" "It...it...it jumped out on me!!" I said. "What did?" he asked. "The creature!!!" I exclaimed. "Well, why did you throw the shell back in the water?" He asked. I thought that was a dumb question at the moment, because who knows how many other "creatures" might be living in that shell! I carefully looked down at my leg where the "creature" had landed. "I didn't know those things could fall out of their shells so easily," I commented as Dan leaned up in the boat to have a look. "It's mud, Babe," he retorted. "Mud." "Mud?" I said sheepishly. "I knew that." 

Would you go find my shell again?" I asked as I picked up a paddle and pretended to help. 

After collecting a fair amount of shells, we paddled out into the open waters of the bay. We hadn't seen any creatures besides crabs, conchs, and oysters up this point, and we were ready to see some larger things. As we rounded the corner a dolphin jumped off to the right of our boat. We both grabbed our paddles (I did actually help this time) and began paddling in the direction of the dolphin. Soon we saw another one! The were jumping and playing in the water as we got closer and closer. All of the sudden they turned towards us, and I began to wonder if dolphins would try to sink kayaks! Probably not, but I have some crazy thoughts at times. The dolphins began to swim around us and under our kayak. It was amazing! They are some of the most beautiful, graceful creatures of the ocean.

After following the dolphins for a fair bit, we decided we should probably turn back before getting too far from the beach. As we (Dan) were paddling back, we came across a tour boat. Now, we know when we are out of our element in knowing, or not knowing, the territory, so we pulled up by the boat to see how much of the tour we could catch. Before you judge, we didn't exactly attach ourselves to the side of the boat or anything, but just got close enough that we could hear the guide point out things to the tourists. Sure enough, this plan paid off! We heard one of the guides yell, "There's a momma manatee with a baby!" No one looked, but us. Everyone on the boat had gotten off onto a sandbar to look for sand dollars. We headed in the direction the lady had been pointing, and shortly saw two large creatures shooting through the water. We were able to keep up with them (no thanks to me) and paddled alongside of them for quite awhile. When they would surface for air, you could see how large these sea cows really are! I began to get a little nervous as to how they felt about us kayaking alongside them. I've never heard of anyone being flipped by a manatee, but I certainly didn't want to make the news by being the first.

We paddled back over to the sandbar to see what we could find there. We didn't see any sand dollars, mainly because we didn't know what we were looking for. But, we did find the largest conch shell I had ever seen! This one definitely had a "creature" in it! This creature stayed put though, as Dan picked up the shell for a picture. 

The day pretty much had been perfect., and our time was running short before we needed to get the kayak back to Bob. We stopped at one more oyster bed to look for shells with no creatures in them. We didn't realize how sharp oyster shells are until we looked down and noticed Dan's foot was bleeding. He hadn't even realized he had cut it. The blood was flowing pretty well. "You know," I said sympathetically, "We've seen almost everything we wanted to see today.....except sharks." 

"Maybe I could actually paddle this time," I continued, "and you could hang your bleeding foot in the water." Dan looked at me like I was crazy. "Well, wouldn't it be exciting to see sharks?" I asked rather defensively 

We paddled back to the shore with Dan's bleeding foot safely in the kayak. I'm sure he'll regret that decision someday when he thinks back on the sharks we could have seen. 

We ended our kayaking adventure by purchasing a 6 foot kayak from Bob, (who did finally come home from his errands) and somehow managing to fit it inside our mini van.

 What good is an adventure anyway, if you can't bring home a souvenir!