“Your wetsuit has some holes in it.” Jacob Kelly told me. “So it’s going to be a little colder for you.”
It was May and we were standing on the banks of the Kananaskis River in the mountains between Calgary and Banff, Canada. The day before it had been snowing. I had finished photographing the surfers for Tourism Calgary and was about to try river surfing in the barely-above-freezing water.
That was not what I wanted to hear.
Because of my work, I have a lot of online friends — people I’ve only spoken to through chat and email and other written communications. They all know I’m Canadian. I’m fairly well-known online as one of those Canadian travel bloggers.
But when first meet people and start to talk eyes widen and jaws go slack. “You really are Canadian.” They’ll say after I let fly a monologue filled with ‘eh’s and ‘oh yeah’s.
This trip was sponsored by Tourism Calgary, but all opinions are my own.
In May Calgary Tourism offered me a challenge; to see how many adventure activities I could fit into 48-hours in the city. They’d send a film crew to document it and they’d foot the bill for the project.
Would I do it?
My high school friend Tyson got married last week. For his stag party we decided to go whitewater rafting on the St. Mary River.
“I had no way of bailing the water out of the kayak, and I was nearly a kilometer from shore.”
I am a master of pushing my luck. I get bored when everything goes right, and a get a strange satisfaction from pushing my little expeditions farther and farther until something finally goes wrong.
When things go really badly, I curse myself for my stupidity and vow never to do it again.
The other day I paddled a kayak out into the middle of Kootenay Lake to shoot this 360 degree panorama.
Over the past year I’ve though more and more about human-powered travel. I have decided that it is something I’d like to do full-time. It’s green, it solves the problem of finding ways to exercise while traveling, and it enables slow, ground level travel, which I like very much.