The Curse of Kayaking
I'd like to write about this one time I went for a kayaking course. In fact, it was the only time, so that narrows it down quite a bit.
Kayaking, for a tall person, is an exhilirating ordeal. On one hand, you're bobbing up and down on the waves, feeling the wind on your sunburnt face, with the closest sign of civilization being the barge that's coming awfully close to you- OH SHIT, while on the other hand, what you wouldn't give if you could just STAND UP for a second and stretch those cramped legs.
Your legs, you see, have to be bent outward so they look form a erogenous diamond in between them. Bracing your knees against the side of your kayak helps you make sure that you're absolutely balanced. Trying the alternative to this, if it can be called that, usually results in some impressive kayak drifting, which would be a lot more satisfying if any of it were intentional.
So you're condemned to having your feet stuck in the same position for hours on end, and if you're sasquatch-like from the ankles down like me, then you'll have no choice but to uncomfortably squirm to change your foot positioning in the claustrophobic space available. It comes as a particularly painful blow when you raft up with the rest of the trainees, which involves paddling next to each other and grabbing the sides of each others' boats to form a giant floating waffle so your instructors can tell you precisely what you were doing wrong earlier, and the short guy next to you just crossed his legs in his kayak. At that point I couldn't help but notice that he didn't have his paddle properly secured, and the instructor wasn't looking.
Well, no. I never did grab and toss that guy's paddle (wiggles eyebrows), but since then I've never taken standing up for granted, or forgotten my horror upon learning that the kayaks we used in the course were the SECOND-smallest variety.
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