This or that

There’s a lot of fun activities out there. The range is from quite safe chess playing until suicidal parachute-jumping. Somewhere in the middle you’ll find me. I’d love to be able to say I’d enjoy a good game of chess, but that would be a lie. I would have to concentrate too much for too long time and the only gain would be to win. On the other side of the range: I’d like to participate, but I’ve heart too many stories about weird people in very close circles as that I think I should invest my time and money into getting there.

While I found good activities for the winter months (like snowboarding/skiing), the proper summer thing was always missing.

I’ve tried my luck with kiting, took one or two courses, got some equipment, but never made it really on the board. And I could convince myself to finally admit, that this might not be the sport for me. It really looked fun. But I failed to take the lesson from the training course and reflect it to the whole sport. It goes like this:

When during a day of planned course activity no wind was suitable, we simply hang out at the beach bar and did nothing. Nothing but talking or sleeping or whatever. Just no stress.

That was a bit tricky the first time, but I got used to it. But this also reflects on the sport: You’re very depending on the weather. Very depending. And there’s plainly nothing you can do about if the wind isn’t right. At the place where course took place, this might set you off only one or two days, but a bit further up north here this can kill you weeks and you need to drive a bit too until you’re somewhere where’s even remotely possible to kite. That was a bigger show stopper than I realized.

So the kayaking-thing introduced itself. Less dependency on the weather (it will be wet anyway), no wind is good, a bit wind is good. A lot of wind isn’t. But that’s not here that often.

I really don’t like to admit, that the kiting thing just isn’t really possible here and not really the style of sport that I’d like to do. I’d love to be able to do it, but all the surrounding that comes with it, is just killing the fun and not worth the effort. The same reason why I don’t get surfing on waves.

Looks like I’m going to try to sell my kiting stuff then and re-invest that money in some equipment that will allow me to go there even further.

It’s painful and exhausting both anyway.