Adventures

I love to find out.

To go, and see, and discover and explore and adventure. I decided, this weekend, while riding down the highway with Lope on the back of the motorcycle, what exactly "adventure" means to me: It's anything you could tell stories about.

So here's ours. Sunday morning we set out for Carolina Adventure World, 2600 acres of, well, adventure, situated about a half hour north of Columbia on the way to Charlotte.

I'd read about it online, and was looking forward to doing some off-roading on the Vstrom, and they've got 100 miles of trails. So we rode up there, and had planned to ride around on the trails, but Al at the gate pretty much talked me out of it. He told us that the trails were pretty rutted from the 4-wheelers, and that there was a lot of loose dirt and mud, and added "that's an awfully nice bike..."

I thought back to the time I accidentally tipped the Vmax on some wet hay-covered grass in Indy, tossing Lope to the ground pretty firmly, and agreed. Lope, who was ready to get off the back of the bike after all that highway riding, and vividly remembers the Vmax incident, was definitely with Al.

So instead we drove a golf cart.

And that was pretty fun, too, if a little slow, and hot, and we kept worrying we'd pull out in front of a pack of dirt-bikers -- they had a way of coming whizzing out of the woods unexpectedly -- but we did explore the trails for an hour or so before lunchtime. And then -- *THEN* -- came the really fun part.

Once the park is up and running (they just opened a few months ago) they'll be offering "Canopy Tours," wherein you "tour" the "canopy" of the South Carolina pine forest by hurtling through it on pulleys clipped to cords strung between the treetops.

This will be an Official Park Attraction in a few more months, once the Tour has gotten all the required permits and been, uh, inspected and everything, but for now you can do it for free!

Provided you have no qualms about dangling 150 feet over the forest floor on an unsanctioned stretch of wire.

Much to my amazement, Penny did not. She nodded, and said she'd do it, and then, by golly, she did it. I went first so I could get some evidence of her adventure:





And an adventure it truly was -- exciting, unexpected, and story worthy. It might have been even better than the time I took Lope on a motorcycle ride and we ended up at the landfill.

Then we piled back onto the non-muddy, non-crashed Vstrom and rode home. We even took a back road, just to see what we'd see.

*****

It was actually kind of a whole weekend of adventure -- sorry, Adventure -- gotta capitalize it -- because on Saturday night we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, a swashbuckler if ever there was one, and I'll tell you it was even better than we'd remembered. The pit, with the snakes? The fistfight under the airplane? The truck chase? Whoo! Adventurous!

And tonight I'm going with Lope to try out her Yoga class (I'm still a little sore from yesterday), and I'm sure that'll be a capital-A-Adventure too.

Maybe I'll come back with a story.