A Day spent doing Kayaking

It was a long weekend in US, the July 4th weekend which is most awaited by approximately 300,000,000 people was starting. I had come back from Indiana on the night before the long weekend. On my flight back to Boston I was thinking about how to spend my long weekend. The plans to go to Washington DC were already cancelled. All the reservations needed to be cancelled and the friends who were supposed to meet me were disappointed with the last minute change of plan. There was nothing much I could do to at this point. "I will just stay at home and read The Kite Runner".

First things first, I finished making some important phone calls. I could hear my roommate talking to someone about some plan for the day. It is still Friday so we had enough time to think about the weekend. Impromptu plans are more successful than the events planned ahead of time and they are more fun because you don't know what you are going to do and with every moment you see something new, something that was not planned and not thought about. We planned to do canoeing @ Hopkinton State Park (http://www.outdoorrec.com/hopkinton-state-park.html), 15-20 minutes drive from Shrewsbury.

The weather was just perfect, we could not have asked for more this weekend. Two cars started from Shrewsbury, my roomie and I in one car with two other friends in the second one. Hopkinton State Park was like a small island isolated from the rest of the city and the busy traffic. Life seemed to come to a halt as soon as we entered the park. It was still a few mitnutes drive to the lake. The roads were small, covered with the tress, plants and rocks on both the sides as if God had designed it purposely for the people around the area to relax and cut themselves off from the rest of the world and unwind their true self.

This was my first time canoeing and I had absolutely no clue of how it is done but whatever I had heard from people, I was up for it at the same time I kept my excitement to the minimum low. I don't know how to swim and we were going in center of the lake, deep enough and fed by continuous spring of water. You could canoe, kayak, rent a boat and go the any of the two beaches to "swim", I was not thinking about doing it anyways, and do all the fun stuff that you can think of doing at the beach.

Dressed in shorts and tanks, the girl gang after applying the sunblock was walking towards the kayak rental office. Yes, I thought we were going to do canoeing but after reaching there one of the girls mentioned Kayaking is more fun. "Heck ya, I really don't care as long as it's fun and adventure". Handed my license to the female dressed in the dress code for the staff members: red t-shirt and pants, behind the desk. The yellow card with my last name on top in big capital letters written in black marker "MOONAT" let us rent two kayaks for four of us.

The experienced person sits at the back and the novice like me, sits in the front. The guy in red t-shirt instructed me what to do and how to use the double bladed paddle. Although it is not a rocket since but I don't understand things unless I do them. My roomie sitting behind me was instructing me how to paddle. Laughing at my stupid moves we were trying hard to go straight. After few paddles, I got it. I got the idea of how to move the kayak to left, to right and when to do it. We stopped at some point and let the kayak float on water, the water not warm and cool enough to soothe us from the scorching heat. Others behind us, we were yelling at them to stop where we had taken a hault. The funny part was, we were trying to hit our friends on the paddle boat and running away from them. After an hour of fun and splashing water at each other, we finally decided to return the kayaks and go to the beach.

The beach was not something you'd expect to be in Florida or near the coastal sides. It was a small beach with few people swimming, some getting a tan and a group playing volley ball while others playing the role of a spectator. There was a small hiking range, I don't know if I should call it hiking or not be we had to climb our way to top to see the spring of water. There were 9 of us who were walking up the hill, kinda, teasing and taking pictures. The day did not end yet, the only thing that ended was the fun time with all of them. There was more to come for some us from that group for the rest of the day.

All of you out there, this is a must try if you like to do adventurous things.

Next, I want to do sky diving and bungie jumping.