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Canada 2012: Fun with Water

I didn't grow up going to the beach very often, so I don't have warm and fuzzy memories of being near water. This was largely due to the fact that I learned to swim as a teenager, but the fact that the water in the nearest beaches is really cold didn't help matters any, either. Regardless, I can usually be talked in to hanging out at a pool or at the beach, but those aren't exactly at the top of my list of preferred activities. Even with this as a detractor, though, I discovered that I can still have quite a bit of fun while on or near the water.


First of all, we ended up going whale watching on one afternoon. I didn't really think much of it before we left, but whale watching is one of those activities that sucks you in. One moment you're just sitting around on a boat talking, and the next you find yourself absorbed in the task of spotting brief flashes of whale tail. I think part of the fun was in trying to get a decent picture or video of the whales. It's not as easy as it sounds, since you have to simultaneously focus on the horizon and something like a view finder that's only a few inches from you. Worse yet, the whales only come up for very brief moments, so even if you decide to simply take a video, you may not be taking a video of the correct patch of ocean. Needless to say, the challenge of it all added to the fun, and I ended up enjoying those two hours quite a bit.


Now, one of the things that the crew had told us was that you could walk in to the bridge of the ship if you wanted to look for whales straight ahead. At one point, I did just that. However, I noticed that the captain looked like he was just hanging out, barely holding on the ship's steering wheel. Curious, I turned to him, and asked, "is it really as easy as you're making it look?" He chuckled a bit, said yes, and then said that he'd let me try it on the way back. And true to his word, the captain let me drive/steer on the return trip. I made the mistake of expecting a rapid response similar to driving a car, so within seconds I had made the ship bank hard to one side. He corrected me, so I managed to steer us in the general direction safely. It was pretty fun, though, and I can cross one more vehicle of my "yup, I've driven that" list (unicycle, motorcycle, submarine, helicopter, tank, and rocket ship are still on the to-do list).

The next interesting bit came when we stopped at the Bay of Fundy. I'd never heard of the place before, but it apparently had some of the highest tides in the world (roughly 40-60 feet). To make matters more interesting, these tides come in and out twice a day. If you were to time it right, you could walk on what used to be the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean only a few hours before. Want to guess what we did while there? Yup, we technically walked on the bottom of the ocean.

It was really, really muddy, and I got my shoes dirty despite my best intentions. Luckily, it wasn't too bad, so we walked the entire length of stretch of "beach." Well, actually, I probably stopped something like 50 feet short, because one of the park ranger type people yelled at us to turn around and go back. I really had no intention of tempting the tides, but still, I didn't want to get in trouble so I turned around. I'm proud to report that we got back to high ground with plenty of time to spare before the tide came back in.

So, all in all, I managed to spot a bunch of whales, drive a whaling boat, and walk on the bottom of the ocean during this trip. Not bad for a kid who doesn't like water all that much, I'd say.

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