A Kayaking Adventure

This past Saturday, my friend Maeve (thanks Maeve!) organized a bunch of us to go kayaking down in the Ardennes. I was a bit skeptical as to how cool this kayaking trip would be, I mean, come on, we are in Belgium - not exactly the outdoorsmans dream of a country. So I thought. We took an early train to Dinant - the city that I had visited before - and then hopped on a short connecting train to a town called Gendron - Celles, which consisted of....well....a hotel and a fry stand - and a few kayaking places. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, about 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

After we successfully navigated our way to the Kayak place that we had made the reservation at, we assembled into teams, tucked our stuff into every nook and cranny on the kayak, and set off for a 12 kilometer kayak trip down the Lesse River in Southern Belgium. There were twelve of us in total, so we were given 6 double kayaks. These things weren't exactly top quality, but they would make do. One group swapped their kayak for a more luxury edition (for a few extra bucks) but little did they know that further down the line, their luxury kayak would be an upside down kayak...muahahahaha.

Ryan and I were in the same kayak, as he had very little kayaking experience and I kind of know what im doing. We were the only two guys on the trip, with ten other girls, so we were showing off our machoness by ripping by everyone in our kayak and creating as big of a scene as possible. The scenery at first was mediocre, reminded me of kayaking back home. But then we got into some pretty gnarly areas with some huge cliffs and big open fields. The water had quite a strong current, and even some rapids at some points. We came around one corner and BAM, there was a humongous castle just resting on a cliff ahead. WOW. Now it didn't feel like home. This was amazing.

A little further on and we encountered our first obstacle. A dam. Yep, no warning signs or anything, just a 10 foot dam in our way. Seeing a group of Belgian boyscouts ride over it with little problems gave me the courage to do so myself...no problem. Too bad some of the girls got stuck...



We continued on and pulled off at a beach to have some lunch and chill out for a bit. That was fun. And then continued on. By this time, our kayak was carrying about an inch of water in it, and all of our spare clothes were soaked....as well as my wallet and cell phone...whoops. And there it was again, another dam. This one was slightly more intimidating than the first, and there was no one in front of us to show us how it was supposed to be done. There was however, a restaurant at the shore with a bunch of people outside watching the kayakers go by. They all seemed to be shouting "Wrong WAYYY" to Ryan and I, but we didn't know why. Until we were flying off a dam and nearly capsizing. Apparently the one spot we decided to go down was the one spot you aren't supposed to go down, because this was a straight up drop off, not a gradual bump. Needless to say I almost bailed out of the kayak and lost my paddle at the bottom of the river.....

We continued on our way, when our friends in the luxury kayak collided with a rock and flipped over....HILARIOUS. Probably the funniest scene of my life.

We finished up the trip and dropped our kayaks at the rendevous point, which conveniently had a nice cafe where we enjoyed some frys and some beers to celebrate our victory of the Belgian river dams. As for the paddle, I played a smooth move and grabbed everyone we were withs paddles and threw them all on the truck..they didnt even notice :).

Hope you enjoy the pictures!