Finally, the kayak post. I’m not even going to apologize for the crappy, foggy pictures from the Worst Camera Ever Made (underwater edition). Any quality of pictures cannot recreate the fabulousness of this trip.

However, it started off rockily. I inadvertently dressed completely matchy-matchy — my shirt, backpack and water shoes all contained the same nauseating lavender.

My sister knows me well — she took one look at me and said “you must be in pain!” I do not like being matchy-matchy.

There aren’t any pictures of me kayaking, since I was the camera bearer. Here I am before the trip, starting to feel uneasy at all the gear I was forced to wear — wetsuit, life vest and helmet? What exactly was I getting into?

This was Santa Cruz, one of the Channel Islands. I couldn’t believe I never went there, when we finally visited a couple years ago. Now we’ve been four times. I recommend.

Once we got suited up, our guide gave us a bit of on-land kayak orientation. My sis and bro-in-law are familiar with watercraft and comfortable with the great outdoors. Me, I am comfortable in my lack of knowledge about those things. I was honest with our guide that I was a bit of a spazz and prone to, uh, mistakes. He basically told me to keep him between me and the rocks and pushed me out to sea.

It was a hard workout, often scary, and utterly, magically fantastic.

The cliffs are dotted with sea caves, through which we’d paddle. They were tricky — often they were a tight fit, and you had to time your entrance with the ebb of the sea. Sometimes you had to kind of lie back, so that your brains wouldn’t get bashed in. I was hopeless in following the guide’s instructions, but he was kind and capable as he regularly pushed me away from danger and unstranded me from the rocks.

There was one moment when the full force of the potential danger of our activity hit me. I was in a cave, when a sudden wave surged and I kind of was abruptly deposited in the rocks exactly in the part of the cave the guide warned me against. He was yelling instructions that were bouncing off my panicked ears, and I ended up stuck and backwards and a little freaked. As the guide untangled me, he laughed and yelled to my sister to get a load of my situation. I guess danger is a matter of perception.

It was absolute perfection.

You can see more pictures in the full photoset.