Checking Off Items On The Bucket List

Bucket List: A list of things you want to do/see before you kick the bucket.

Everyone has one, wether they know it or not. And some people may have theirs written down or documented. Mine however, is in my head and not quite finished yet. And sometimes I'll add things to my bucket list at the last minute just to have an excuse to do it, like skydiving for instance, or getting in a sharks cage.

Now my bucket list has some very unreasonable things on it that I will most likely never get to do in my lifetime, like travel to each continent or win the lottery. However, there are more reasonable events on it that I will most likely get done, such as have a place of my own, get married, have Matthew McConaughey's children, you know, very realistic goals.

Recently, I checked off another item on the list: Go whitewater kayaking. Now, in all fairness, this wasn't really on my bucket list, but with an undocumented list as I said before, I can kinda add things as I go, right?

Kayaking has never really been my thing. My father and twin brother are the kayaking guru's of the family. And bless Michael's heart, he's been trying to get me to go for years. However, after a failed attempt at my senior project product (geez, say that 5 times fast), which was learning how to roll over in a kayak, I didn't have much interest in drowning upside down in a kayak. Recently though, Michael had been slowly taking me to the lake to teach me my roll. Five years from my senior project attempt, I finally got it! So what do you do once you learn to roll? You practice on a river, of course. Here's a video of my newly learned roll. Michael's so proud. Don't forget to turn off the music at the bottom.

So two weekends ago, Michael, Pops, all of Pop's old kayaking friends, and myself, all headed to the Nantahala River for a weekend of kayaking and camping. The Nantahala is one of the easiest rivers to kayak in NC (so I was told), with just a few bigger rapids. We had a good weekend, and I got some experience on whitewater. On Saturday I took a few good beatings at the Nantahala Falls and thought that at one point I was going to drown. But regardless of the beatings, I think I'll continue to kayak... there were a ton of hot guys on the river!

So here's the video from our trip. I'm the one in the green boat in case you can't tell. You can see at one point where I flipped at the falls and had to swim out of my kayak. A big thanks to my twin for putting together these videos for me. Enjoy!