The past week has been a flurry of adventure and fun filled business. Kayaking in France, was particularly adventurous for a non-active, inside girl such as myself. Having gone white-water rafting on the Nile in class 5 rapids, I spent a lot of time mentally preparing myself for flips in ridiculously large rapids, gulps of questionable water being inhaled as waves crashed into the rather small apparatus I had, perhaps wrongly, chosen to be in for the next 8 hours. With each rapid, although not extremely large, I none-the-less squealed, yelled or flat out screamed. Not sure if the French were quite as amused as my cousin was at my expression of emotion. My biggest fear for the day was that I would be thrown into the glacier cold water. My expert kayaking partner assured me that I would not be thrown in while going threw a rapid. What I was more concerned about was that the two boys in our party would throw me in as it seemed to be their mission for the day to see me dunked. Sadly they managed to accomplish that mission. After much screaming, threats on life and limb and even jumping into their kayak to avoid the tipping of the one I was in. This however only resulted in them jumping into mine and successfully plunging me into the freezing cold water. My next issue was then getting back into the kyak while still in the water. This can be a very humorous thing to watch and an extremely challenging thing to do. Legs flail, arms struggle to pull the dead wait out of the water and laughter ensues causing any and all strength left to immediately vanish. I was finally pulled into the kayak like a giant dead fish flung into the boat. Hiking was more my style of an outdoor activity. I climbed up rocks, clamored across fallen trees and jumped from rock to rock across streams.

With a week and a half until my short stop over in London before my trip home and my papers behind me, Im watching after my cousin's kids, changing diapers and wiping sticky hands.