A Quick Giveaway, Plus Our New Toys

Okay, first, thanks to a friend and MVP Healthcare, I have a couple of of Family 4-pack general admission entries to the Back to School Expo at the Empire State Plaza this Saturday, September 7th. Because I was consumed with painting M’s room (BOTH girls’ rooms are DONE! Hooray!), I’m running a bit behind schedule, so I’m doing the giveaway a bit differently to expedite the process. If you’d like a family 4-pack (incidentally, it’s a $28 value and is general admission, not to be confused with the $25 VIP admission, which includes a meet-and-greet autograph with “CeCe” from “Shake It Up”), email me at capitaldistrictfun [at] yahoo [etc.] with the subject like “BTS Expo” and your complete mailing address in the text of the email, and if you’re super-fast, I’ll email you back to let you know that I’m sending you passes. I’ll update when they’re gone. UPDATE: We’re done. I’ve got more entries than giveaways already. If you’ve already emailed me, I’ll let you know tomorrow if you’ve won–right now I’m too sleepy to be coherent in an email.

Okay! Enough business.

Guess what appeared on Woot right after we returned from our lovely camping trip on the lake? Deeply-discounted Sea Eagle inflatable kayaks! If you’re not familiar with Woot, it’s a website that offers daily deals which are sometimes okay and sometimes spectacular. If you have a problem with impulse shopping, just stick your fingers in your ears and sing “La, la, la,” because this site is too dangerous for you. But we are not impulse shoppers, generally speaking, so we pass up almost everything until The Universe tells us that we Must Buy.

And in this case, I think The Universe wanted us to purchase the inflatable kayaks. The girls both love kayaking, but kayaks are pretty freakin’ expensive. We’ve looked at them longingly for years now, but even during end-of-season sales, they’re still not exactly cheap. During our camping trip, we didn’t rent kayaks for the day because if we’d rented them for the day we would have felt morally obligated to use them for most of the day, and we also had plenty of hiking to do. But you can’t exactly hang out on a beach next to kayaks and not long to use one. Or, maybe you can, but we can’t. As we were driving home, Cute W said, “I feel like we’re the only people on the road who don’t have a canoe or a kayak on their car.” It was pretty much true. But our car isn’t huge, anyway, and we’d put one of those storage bins on the roof to stow all of our gear, so it’s not like we could have put the Mythical Kayak We Don’t Actually Own on our car’s roof, anyway. Sigh. . . .

And then, ta-da! Deeply discounted inflatable kayaks! It was meant to be. We ordered two of them, ran out and got some life jackets, and this morning we took our maiden voyage on Round Lake:

It was very fun and an arm workout. We brought the kayaks to the lake uninflated, then pumped them up lakeside in about ten minutes, and honestly? They worked great. They felt stable and not tippy at all, and they were pretty dang comfortable, inflatable seats and all.

It was an excellent outing, and now I’m open to suggestions on where we should go next. We went with Round Lake with the help from comments to an old All Over Albany post I’d remembered, but I also discovered a new (to me) blog, Quiet Kayaking in New York State.