My wife and I recently travelled to Ecuador for vacation and to pick up our daughter, Brynn. She had been living there attending university for winter/spring semester. This would allow us to see a beautiful country and have a relatively inexpensive, fluent Spanish-speaking tour guide. The country was very beautiful and everyone we met were very friendly and helpful.
We did have one adventure that was very frightening, after I could process it! We took a white water rafting trip for 2 hours down a River outside of Baños which should have been a class 3/4 trip except for the rain storm the night before that turned our river into a class 4/5 trip! When we arrived at the put-in point our team (the three of us, one guy from London, and two ladies from Bath, England) had to demonstrate proficiency in paddling instructions and wearing our Personal Flotation Devices. Each of the two rafts had to come up with their team name, which we chanted after completing each of the rapids. Our name was Staying Alive.
The height of the trip was getting caught in a class 5 hydraulic for about two minutes (seemed like hours). I remember thinking I had to hold on and NOT let the raft tip over! Hydraulics take their fair share of paddlers lives! The other thing I rememberd was how to survive a hydraulic – swim to the bottom and then swim perpendicular to the hydraulic flow. If the hydraulic flow was too strong for you to swim to the bottom with your PFD, you might have to pop it off! Yet my PFD is my friend, my comfort food! Would it not be dangerous to let go of my life line? To this day I don’t know if I could have done it. There are strong attachments to habits and fears!
Well Staying Alive stayed alive, and all the team members left safely for their next adventure.
I wonder how many of us allow our attachments to define our opportunities and in turn tell us which road to take at the fork. Sometimes a road less travelled gives us different opportunities.