For the past few weeks we’ve been making a specific commitment to taking saturday’s off.
It’s been really great, and one of the side benefits is you actually get to look forward to the “weekend”, which is an interesting feeling after 12+ years of self employment where narry a “weekend” was on the agenda.
(Not that we don’t take time off, we totally do, just that we never actually take a entire day off in that way.)
Yesterday as we were hunkering down to work our last pre-weekend day, i noticed the sun streaming in, and the ocean a nice glossy calm. Which sparked me to make an executive decision that the day would be our saturday.
We popped the kayaks in the water and took off for the island across the sound, something i’ve been dying to do since we landed.
The day was simply amazing. There are houses on the island, but they are mostly summer cottages, so it was pretty deserted.
We went for a lovely hike in the forest, over to the other side, then got back in the kayaks and explored the shore line.
What a shore line it was!
I guess because there’s not a lot of human life, the animal life was abundant. We both had a couple of amazing close encounters with sea lions.
At first it was a bit intimidating, as they are so huge, and i personally wasn’t so sure about how safe it was being so close. They seemed to be fine tho, pretty curious, but kept some distance between themselves and the kayak.
They almost seemed playful, and watching us as if to say aren’t we great! At least that’s what i’d like to believe (just googled “are see lions dangerous to kayak’ers and go uhhhh yea, could be… yikes!).
We saw tonnes of seals as well as a plethora of golden and bald eagles as well… what a day!
The trip back was a little hairy as the wind had picked up by then, but i kept my eye on the back of deb deb, and the shoreline, put the petal to the metal through the waves and managed to land on our shore safe and sound. (albiet looking and feeling a little like a limp noodle!).
Then we had a great supper with some random girl we picked up in the library! Well maybe not a “random” girl, but someone we seem to keep running into in the DVD isle of the local library. We’d get to talking movies, picking her brain for movie recommendations, and always walking away saying to each other how much we enjoying running into her. On the last exchange we left all saying let’s maybe do a movie night…. and somehow deb and she made it happen.
It was a lovely evening of getting to know yet another wonderful “coaster” with so many points of connection.
