"Don't go chasing waterfalls..."
We got back from South Carolina today. Work was fun at first because it started thundering pretty much as soon as we got there. Chris made fun of me for bringing a Dunkin Donuts cup to work. I'm not sure if he was mocking me for using such an environment-unfriendly cup or because he thought I was drinking coffee in the middle of the day, but it doesn't really matter.
The cabin we stayed at was really creepy. There were two rooms downstairs that were decent, but there were three of us, and no one wanted to stay upstairs by herself. What ended up happening was that my mother, sister, and I all slept in little twin beds in the room upstairs. Everything was all dark and creepy and old. It smelt like my grandmother's house (and not the good parts of it) and felt like it was twice as old.
The first day we went canoeing and swimming in the lake. That was fun. The second day, on the other hand, was awful. We went up to Lake Joccossee and rented some kayaks. Jennifer had her own, and my mother and I shared one. We had them for four hours, and the first hour and a half was spent kayaking to the middle of the giant lake looking for waterfalls. We never found them. What we did find was that tipping over kayaks isn't as difficult as one might think. It had started to thunder and lightning in the distance, so I was in a slight panic about in the middle of a lake. We had to hang back a bit because Jennifer was so far behind us. My mother was still looking for the fucking waterfalls when suddenly we were tipping face-first into the lake. We tried tipping the kayak back over and climbing back into it, but I fell out again, and then the kayak started to sink. My mother was pulling it up while I was holding the oars, and we were having a really hard time doing it. Jennifer finally ended up taking the oars, but it was still hard. I know how to swim and all, but the panic was making it hard to breathe.
We thought we lost the car keys, but we ended up finding those when an extremely nice family in a motor boat came by and helped lift the kayak out of the water so we could empty it. Then they let us use their stairs to climb back into the kayak. They offered to tow us back to the shore, but Jennifer said that we were fine, so we turned them down. We were going to row over to the shore and then paddle back there where, if we were to fall over again, we would be able to swim to shore and start again.
If only we had made it that far. We were a ten, fifteen minutes' row from shore when Jennifer fell in. We wanted to help her back into her kayak, but we didn't know how we could do that without tipping ourselves in, and then we'd all three of us be stuck in the middle of the lake. We decided to row to shore and then my mom would swim back out and help Jennifer push her kayak to shore. However, we didn't realize how far away we were. We finally got back to shore, and my mother started swimming out to Jennifer while I went to talk to this old guy who was standing on shore. He was of absolutely no help. He didn't have a phone; he didn't know or even try to contact anyone. He didn't even try to comfort me. Instead of saying something to the effect of, "Don't worry, your mom and sister will be fine," he told me all about how they were going to be water-logged and have hypothermia and how you can't trust guys on waverunners because they're stupid and selfish, and that was the only guy who was helping Jennifer.
Finally the guy on the waverunner towed the kayak to shore, and another family on a boat got Jennifer and Mom safely back to shore. The whole ordeal lasted for about an hour, though, and I was terrified. At first, the guy on the waverunner drove past Jennifer and then seemed to be going away again, and for a second I was terrified that he wasn't going back to help her because there was only a boat. Then, when the family on the boat came back to shore, I didn't see my mom on there, and I thought they were coming to tell me they were both dead. Really, they were so far out there that I could barely see them. I saw a little dot that was my mother, but I couldn't see Jennifer at all, only the kayak.
It was a really, really, really long day. I'm glad to be home.
Oh, and I'll be 19 in about an hour.