Adventures

If you know me real well you may know that there are two things I'm almost in crippling fear of.  Snakes and heights.  Keep that in mind.  Terrified of heights.

Yesterday was a HOT day!  It was in the high 90's with a heat index well over 100 degrees.  It was the kind of humidity that you walk outside and are in an instant sweat as your shirt sticks to your body.  We were going to go to Cape May for the afternoon and hang out by the beach.  Unfortunately, camp had quite a few things left to do to get ready for our Open House tomorrow.  So most of us stayed behind to get some more work done.  We still have a little ways to go.  Too many things broke on Wednesday and it took much of yesterday to fix them.  Eventually, Jay, Ashely and I decided that it was just too hot.  We ended up in the camp office eventually where the AC was cranking.  In that time we decided that we were bailing on dinner at camp and going to Owowcow (a little local ice cream place).  We left, had milkshakes for dinner and headed to the lake for some kayaking.  There is a really nice place where you can do some cliff jumping.  It took about 20-30 minutes to paddle out to the rocks, checked the water depth, tied the boats up and began to climb.  Jay was the first back into the water - looked over the edge and leapt. He surfaced and Ashley looked at me to go. I kindly said that she could go before me.  She jumped and resurfaced. And I froze, paralyzed with some crazy fear of heights.  I knew that there was no danger.  I would jump, and I would love it.  Knowing that there was no way back down without looking like a wimp, I looked at the water, found a burst and jumped.  I've done this here before and loved it even more this time.  The water was so refreshing!  After a killer hot day, this was great!  We jumped about 3 or 4 times each.  We were warned that a storm was headed our way before we left.  But there was barely a cloud in the sky.  Until my last jump.  I feel like it was bright out and when I jumped.  By the time I popped back out of the water it was getting dark!  The storm was close.  We hurried back to the kayaks and started back to shore.  We made it around a smaller shore line before the rain started.  As we rounded a bend, the rain became like little .bb's hitting us.  The wind was picking up and we could barely see the shore that we needed to get to anymore.  Still, we pushed through.  Then the thunder and lightning started.  The problem with this is that you are then the tallest thing in a wide open lake; it's the equivalent of walking through a big open field with lightning.  You don't generally want to do it.  But at this point we were in clear eyeshot of the shore we parked the van on.  Bit the wind was crazy!  It was almost like for every 3 paddles forward the wind and waves pushed us back one or two strokes.  Finally, we made the smart decision to turn around and take out on a smaller shore line under some cover of trees.  Turning around in crazy waves was awesome!  We didn't even have to really paddle anymore, the waves carried us right back where we wanted to be.  We waited the storm out a little while and enjoyed each other's company and the amazing lightning show around us.

All in all, it was a great time.  I think that we all have an adventure waiting for us.  We can stand at the top of the rocks and allow the fear to keep us from that adventure, or we can push through it and leap into the unknown.  And how refreshing that leap is!  I'm looking forward to so many more adventures like this one this summer.  And so many more in Kenya in the fall!