too much to say

I think this is probably a bad idea, blogging while I'm still on vacation. It's like writing a restaurant review before you've had dessert.

This trip was probably the best decision I've ever made. And I made it happen, all of it! I feel powerful.

On Thursday I drove up to Cape Reinga. This vacation has changed my relationship to cars forever....mostly, in that I'm no longer scared of them. Am I finally a real grownup? I remember I finally felt like a regular kid when I got over my fear of bikes at age 9 and ended up loving them. I'm nothing if not consistent. Strange that I never saw the connection between my fear of cars and my fear of bikes until now. Oh, speaking of bikes, the kid that got me to be brave enough to ride mine was named Jillian Lewis, who I just found out is on Project Runway. Jeez, how many of my high school class mates are going to end up on reality television!? If I were not me, I'd think I was making this shit up.

Right, Cape Reinga. Yeah, that was beautiful and powerful, but it was the beach 3 km to the east that changed my life forever. See I was feeling really hot and tired from the long drive and was like, Damn, I can't get back in the car yet, I'm sweaty and my back hurts. So I stopped at this bay for a quick swim. Before I knew it, I was being pulled out to sea! Every frantic stroke I made for the shore, I lost 2 strokes to the current. This surfer girl was watching me and yelled, Are you alright? I was too out of breath to answer. Fortunately I then remembered a lesson my 11th grade physics teacher taught me, which was to never expend energy swimming against the current, use 100% of your energy to swim in a favorable perpendicular direction. So I gave up trying to get back to the beach and made for some rocks I felt pretty confident I could make in time. The rocks had all this seaweed growing off them that I used like Rapunzel's suitor to pull myself up on, reassuring the worried surfer girl. I staggered over the rocks in pure adrenalin shock (I couldn't feel at the time what the rocks were doing to my poor bleeding feet, adrenalin is an amazing numbing agent) and collapsed in a water-filled hollow for the next half hour, thinking about nothing. On the way out of the beach I saw the warning sign (so why were all those other people swimming there! damn.) which said, "Caution should be exercised when swimming on this beach. Drownings have occurred." The owner of the place I'm staying at told me there are lots of problems with beaches up here, even the supposedly safe ones, and that he teaches all his kids to never try and swim against the current but to follow it out and around until someone can rescue them, that panicking is what causes the drownings since the water is so warm up here. Good advice.

I've done lots of stuff on my vacation other than almost drown, maybe I'll update this later. Tommorow I swim with dolphins! I miss you all though. I love the end of Joe's last blog entry that mentions the problem with traveling - all the missing that occurs. Back and forth, forever!

Enjoy your fabulous parties on NYE everyone.