DAY THIRTY: KAYAKING

Sandra Bullock loves all things that take place near or on top of (or even several feet beneath the surface of) water.  If you believe in Hugh Everett's theory of multiple universes (as I do), accept that there is a parallel universe in which Sandra Bullock is presently tearing across the top of a lake somewhere on a jet ski or swimming with dolphins off the coast of a tropical island.

Alas, she lives in this universe and is saddled with a husband who'd spent much of his pretending he loves being near or on the water until recently admitting to himself that a deck overlooking a lake, the ocean or a river (in that order), with a beer and maybe a nice cheese plate, is his optimal relationship with water.  

However things go in those universes that Hugh Everett believes spin out whenever we choose to do or not to do something, in this one we believe in compromise, so while we are not jet skiing or swimming with dolphins on this trip -- nobody is because honestly it's not dolphin-swimming weather -- we can go kayaking.

How badly did Sandra Bullock want to go kayaking?  Badly enough to consider kayaking a good option when our boat to Great Blasket Island got grounded -- because of rough seas.  Badly enough to fall into silence when I greeted that suggestion with an involuntary "Are you KIDDING?" making me feel bad enough to spend a few hours that night researching kayaking opportunities in Kenmare, our next stop.  I came up with Star Adventures.

Much like cross-country skiing, I do enjoy kayaking, conditionally.  I like it in a lake, on a warm day, or in calm open water with guide, like we did during our 25th anniversary trip to the San Juan Islands.  That trip, two epic hours on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, surrounded by the breathtaking scenery of the Pacific Northwest, was a highlight in a trip full of highlights.  It gave me a new enthusiasm for kayaking, enough to integrate it into our small town weekend house fantasy, which now includes a Subaru with a roof rack.  I wasn't sure if slicing through the white caps in Kenmare Bay would meet any of my kayaking conditions.  

No matter.  We made the kayaking reservations.  My concession:  we pushed the start time (when we would "put-in" the water) out to 11 AM.  "Uh, the weather will be better later in the day," I suggested lamely (and wrongly).  I was just stalling.  Also, tomorrow we have to leave our spacious AirBnB for two more weeks of hotels.  I want to hang out here as much as I can, within reason, maybe just run the dishwasher over and over.  No rushing around in the morning. 

The morning dawned sunny and clear, another day of cheating the iPhone weather app report.  "It's not supposed to rain until 4," I told my chipper wife, who didn't really care if it rained or not.  No amount of rain was going to, uh, rain on her kayak parade.  

Okay, so that condition was met.  Good.  And Kenmare Bay?  That's not the open sea, so it'll be calm, right?  And then when we got to Star Adventures, after six typically terrifying miles of driving, we saw that they only had open top kayaks, not sea kayaks, the kind that they basically sew you into where it looks like you could just suddenly capsize and be stuck there, upside down and sewn into your kayak.  Good, though I had to feign disappointment because I guess we were in the other kind during the amazing San Juan Islands kayak trip and they were really cool?  Regardless.

Sadly, we were only three at this point.  Princess Grace awoke to stabbing pains in her forearm and wrist, so we had to place her on I.R.  It left the three of us -- Peter O'Toole, Sandra Bullock and me -- to meet our guide, 17-year-old Sarah from West Cork, who drove 40 miles every day over that mountain back there for her summer job.  No humiliating "N" placard in her window, not Sarah.

Sweet black booties replaced our shoes, smartly.

We got in our kayaks -- camouflage for Bullock, Sarah and me, slightly underripe banana-colored for O'Toole (not the kind of thing he's going to let go by without comment.  "What?  Am I the Hello Kitty kayaker?" he cracked, noting his yellow kayak and day-glo pink life jacket) -- and "put in."  Soon we were gliding across a glassy Kenmare Bay, a pursuit so casual as to leave us plenty of time to force poor young Sarah to answer question after question about her life.  Yes, she is going to college, to study engineering, and she's been all over Europe but never to the U.S., though the family has a trip planned in the fall to visit her 23-year-old brother, who just got a job in Boston (of course) through a college professor of his.  

S.B. in her natural habitat: water.

Sometimes Sarah kayaked behind us, herding us like wayward cattle.  Other times she sat in her kayak with her paddle across her lap, watching us with a somewhat bemused expression.  Other times she called out to Sandra Bullock and me because we'd gotten too far from everyone else.  "Lets wait here until we're all together," she said calmly.  

Remember how traumatic it was when you'd do something like go on a kayaking trip and find out that the guide was younger than you?  The guide is now younger than our children.  We've officially reached the "It's so great that you're just out here at your age" phase of life.

Not me, though.  I wasn't ready to accept that, and I know Sandra Bullock feels the same.  O'Toole, a habitual sufferer of lower back issues, was too focused on maintaining good form to worry about pace.  As he smoothly and unhurriedly paddled across the water, he occasionally called out things like, "This is some kind of core workout, isn't it?" or "This is reminding me that I've got to work on my lats."

We paddled out for an hour and then stopped.  We'd reached the halfway point in a third of the time.  From my camouflage kayak, my neck already screaming at me for the sin of bad posture, I secretly congratulated us.  "Not too old to shatter your 90 minutes out, 90 minutes in paradigm, are we?" I thought.  We decided that an early return was okay and started back.  I'm pretty sure Sarah, who was a bit flummoxed, offered that we could "go on the water trampoline" when we got back, if there was time.

Just short of two hours later, we returned to the dock.  We'd covered the same amount of bay in twice the time -- and four times the effort.  

Lost in reverie, pre-wind.

It started out fine.  In fact, a few minutes after starting back, so keen was my rhythm that I found myself lost in reverie, deep in the small town second home fantasy:  "I'll wake up early in the morning, strap my kayak to the top of my Subaru and put in at the nearest lake.  That's how each day will begin, me kayaking across a lake, maybe laying back in the kayak and just feeling serene.  And I'll get back to the house at nine, take a shower and begin working on my novel..."

I looked over at Sandra Bullock, who was smiling at me, clearly understanding the power of this fantasy or perhaps just overwhelmed with happiness to be finally kayaking.  I smiled back and then, as she does, my wife contorted her body into a cartoon-like hunch and laughed -- imitating my clearly comical hunched-over posture, apparently.  

Fantasy now successfully shattered, I spent the rest of the trip focusing as hard on posture as I normally do on staying to the left, which became harder and harder as the wind became stronger.  By the time we were halfway back, it as blowing pretty good, kicking up bigger and bigger waves and convincing us that, while we were paddling hard, we were going nowhere, perhaps even backward.  

We convened one last time.  "Are we even moving?" Sandra Bullock moaned.

"That island, it's not getting any closer!" I concurred.

Peter O'Tool floated silently up, serene.

"Okay, we go to the left this island (stay to the left).  As soon as we get around it, we'll be in a protected cove.  The put-in spot is right around there," Sarah instructed.  That was all I needed.  I plunged my paddles into the water like pistons, forcing myself, comically hunched-over posture or not, into high gear.  "If I can make it around this bend," I told myself, it'll get easy again.  On and on I rowed, like George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in that movie about doomed fishermen in Massachusetts, cresting the tops of waves and bottoming out, staring ahead at a sailboat that was anchored off the tip of the island (a bit about the island:  Denis Island is private, owned by "a Wall Street guy" who visits for six weeks every year and maintains a year-round staff.  No one is allowed on the island without permission.  The island's main house, hidden from shore, is visible when you round its tip, which was enough motivation to get Peter O'Toole through the same windstorm I rowed through, only slowly enough to have time to check out the mansion while paddling past.).

Finally, we passed the island and, with the wind now at our backs, sailed into the cove.  "Man!"  Sandra Bullock shouted when she caught up.  "That was crazy!"  She didn't mean crazy bad; she meant crazy fun.  She was smiling ear-to-ear.  "Are you having fun?" she asked.

"Oh yeah," I said, because I was.  Casually paddling is really fun and relaxing.  Lasering in on a goal to get you through whitecaps and a heavy Irish winds isn't relaxing but it's still fun. 

We reached the docks and did not go on the water trampoline because we're 54 years old.  Sarah hopped out of her boat, pulled it up onto the shore and disappeared.  By the time she returned we'd almost extricated ourselves from our boats.  "I have to unfold myself," said Bullock.  I got out and almost fell because my knees had locked up after not moving for two hours.  "Oy," I said simply.  

Feeling returned to my legs several minutes later.  By then we were back at Star Adventures, sitting at a picnic table, freezing in our wet clothes.  Peter O'Toole had disappeared into the gents' changing room, soon to reappear refreshed and elegant in his athleisure wear.  Six twisty and narrow miles later, we were home, lounging around in dry clothes, exhausted and satisfied and ready for happy hour.

Here are today's waterborne numbers:

6 -- number of seals spotted (mostly by Sarah and Sandra Bullock) today while kayaking.  "They're nosy," said Sarah.

3 -- area, in percent, of my clothing that remained dry throughout the trip.  

100 -- total population of Sarah's high school, in which lessons are taught in Gaellic.  The high school she would have gone to otherwise has a population of 1,000.

less than 10 -- number of times I've actually been kayaking.  When Sandra Bullock told Sarah that we were "experienced" kayakers, she was technically lying, at least about me.

24 -- ounces of water consumed by me during kayaking from a bottle I stowed on the kayak behind my seat.  Of those 24 ounces, approximately 21.3 were tainted by sea water.

This wraps up the Kenmare segment of the sabbatical, leg one of the Peter O'Toole and Grace Kelly sub-section.  Sandra Bullock and I very sad to be leaving our AirBnB and re-entering the world of hotels.  Tonight we will madly be doing as much laundry as possible, which still probably won't free us from having to wash stuff in a bathroom sink at some point in the next two weeks.  That's right:  two weeks.  

In that two weeks we will stay at least overnight in:  Cork, Kilkenny, Dublin, Liverpool, Keswick, Chipping Campden, Bath and Windsor.  That's seven hotels in two weeks.  When we get home we're going to hug all of our appliances and tell them how much we've missed them.