D.I.Y. Adventure

I have been looking forward to this past Saturday for months. Hang gliding! A perfect adventure for my sister and I to do to celebrate her birthday. Her birthday last year? Sky diving. My birthday? Southern Ground. So of course hang gliding was ranking pretty high on our Top Birthdays list. The weather on Saturday was forecasted to be perfect. In fact, it was the most beautiful November day in Tennessee that I can remember. 80 degrees. Sunny. Not a cloud in the sky. Slight breeze…. Except in the area near Chattanooga where we were going to be hang gliding, a slight breeze translates into high tail winds. Yep, thanks to some major tail winds our hang gliding trip was postponed. I see it as a sign... A sign that we should reschedule for another time.

My sister and I decided that tail winds wouldn’t ruin our day so we created our own adventure. And even though every idea seemed kind of small after our dreams of jumping off of a cliff, we still made the best of it. We drove out to the Cookeville area to kayak the Caney. But they tried to rip us off with an incredibly overpriced kayak tour. We didn’t have a back up plan for our back up plan, so we sat there in the middle of Small Town, America discussing our options. At this point we were set on a water sport, so we called around.

Center Hill Marina. This is Sparkle.

Hi Sparkle, how much does it cost to rent a jet ski?

We aren't renting jet skis right now.

Okay, how about a canoe?

A canoe? $22.

Okay, we’ll take the canoe.

We weren’t actually going to rent a jet ski, I was just interested in the pricing. But Sparkle thought it was quite humorous that I wanted pricing on both a jet ski and a canoe – and settled for the canoe.

There were a few boats out on the lake, but the water was so calm. In fact, we liked when boats would pass us by so that we could catch a little bit of a ride on the wake. It was the perfect day. It’s rare to get a suntan in November!

I enjoyed trying to whack every single bug in sight with my paddle.

When we were feeling really crazy we would paddle really fast through a flock of birds just to watch them scatter across the water. 

The TN landscape was gorgeous as usual.

And to make our trip a little more interesting we made a rule that while in the canoe, you could only speak in an accent or in song. It made conversations about hydroelectricity, upcoming travel plans, and our careers a whole lot more fun than normal. You should try it some time.

After 3.5 hours, we returned to the dock and returned to our normal voices.

Our day definitely did not go as planned, but we made our own fun… matey.