Sleeping with the Buffalo

Our next big adventure during the summer of the kayak was to do it on the Ocean. We traveled up to Bar Harbor, Maine to go with a group of people with a professional outfit. This adventure outfit provided you with everything you would need for a two day outing. Two guides would take us out and around on the ocean, cook all the meals for us, clean the dishes, help us waterproof pack our gear and make sure we didn’t get lost at sea. We only had to paddle, stay in the kayak and set up our tents. So what it lacked in being rugged since most everything was done for us it made up for the sense of the unknown and adventure. It was just what this Dyke always dreamed of doing. The Wife on the other hand went into zone.out.land for the two days but she was there physically and we were a team.

The kayaks were doubles. The Wife sat in the front hole with her skirt on and I sat in the back hole skirted in. The rear passenger was the “driver” meaning I took care of the keel of the kayak with my feet. With each having our own double headed paddles it took us a while to look like we were synchronizing our strokes'. We never made it to absolute synchronization, we only got close.

We saw a lot of wild life in the ocean. Got close to dolphins, some seal type mammal and the Wife swore she saw a something similar to the loch ness monster. What was nice about this kayaking trip was we never had to really fear about tipping over unlike the white water trip from hell I had done earlier that summer.

At the end of the first day the crew beached our kayaks onto an island. It looked deserted but once we started up the hill to the area where we were going to pitch our tents we started to see big piles of dung. I quickly asked one of the guides who would do something that big and he informed me that they were buffalo chips. I quickly rewound the tape in my head of the pamphlet I had received in the mail about the trip. I didn’t remember reading anything about buffalo. The guide told us the “herd” (WTF, a herd equates to a lot more than one?) was on the island to keep the grasses low which helped in the prevention of fires. Nice, no fires just a ton of tripping hazards. He said that they won’t bother us. Now how he knew that a herd of buffalo wasn’t going to bother us was beyond my understanding since we were standing in an area that was loaded with these chips. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night waiting for the stampede to trample over our tents. I never heard the stampede nor saw one buffalo, the guide was right.

The other piece of info that was missing in the not so informational pamphlet was how we would not have any bathroom facilities on the island. Peeing was no problem, just find a bush, rock or buffalo to stand behind. The other though was a bit of an issue. Since we couldn’t add to the already mounting chip pile on the island we were told we had two ways to take a shit. Dig a hole near the water then cover it up. Or find a flat rock, place your deposit on it then pick up the rock and skip it out into the ocean. I choose the former and the Wife choose to hold it all inside until the two days of her zoning out was over.

Our second day on the water was just as much fun as the first. We tried putting our sail up but thankfully there wasn’t enough wind because I’m sure we would have tipped over since the Wife would have been in charge of the sail.

After an exhilarating weekend we said our goodbyes to the others. Everyone couldn’t wait to get to their hotels or B&Bs to take showers, long hot showers. The Wife burned a hole into my head with her eyes when she was hearing that because we were going to head to a camp ground for the rest of the week. Come on, it was at the beautiful Acadia National Park where we were going to do more tent camping minus the buffalos though. We got to our site, pitched the tent then had to drive the car outside the campground and go across the street to where the showers were. For 25 cents you got three minutes of water. The Wife is a good sport and l like I said, I had a great time on this vacation and the Wife, well she doesn’t stay mad at me for long.

Vacation Rating

Dyke - 8

Femme - 2

It was amazing that the Wife still loved me after this vacation.