When I had a job but would go on vacation, I always used to say that I needed a few extra days after vacation to recover from my vacation. If DW and I travelled abroad, we would always try to book a return flight that would give us at least one full day to rest before returning to work.
I now have the luxury of time after a vacation because I don't have a job to go back to. And this week, I really needed the past couple of days to recover from our trip.
There are some metrics that my Garmin smart watch takes that I don't put a lot of stock into, but there are some that seem to be quite accurate. For example, it has a reading that's called Body Battery, where it measures my heart rate, my blood-oxygen levels, and activities, and determines how energized I am.
Any time I feel exhausted and look at the Body Battery reading, my watch seems to agree with me, showing a low percentage of energy. When I feel that all I can do is rest, for example, my Body Battery reading agrees, showing me at five-percent "charge."
When I awake feeling well-rested, the Body Battery shows a high "charge" level.
Each morning, it shows stats that indicate how ready my body is to tackle activities, and on this vacation, it showed me some interesting numbers.
DW and I spent 10 days in Québec's Laurentian mountain region, including the fjords of the Saguenay River. We camped for the first seven days, did plenty of kayaking and hiking, and sampled some great beer from this region.
Oh, and we saw lots of whales.
We started of with five nights in Parc National de la Jacques-Cartier, a beautiful park that's only a half hour north of Québec City. And because we started our vacation on the Labour Day weekend, it was crowded with day trippers from the city.
Our first paddle was a short one, only a 4.7-kilometre paddle along the Jacques-Cartier River where the water is mostly flat, but on which there is a current that will gently lead you southward. The hills that line the sides of this river are nothing short of stunning, and it was gently raining throughout our paddle, with clouds creeping around the ridges of these mountains.
The next day, we paddled another part of the river, when the weather was nicer and the temperature warmer. We had just finished a gruelling 6K trail that had us climbing steep parts of the hillside below where we were paddling now, and the short 3.7K paddle was just what we needed to decompress.
However, the next day of paddling was going to be a tough one.
DW and I reserved a seat on a shuttle bus that would tow our kayaks along with rental crafts—both kayaks and canoes—and other paddlers up 20 kms to a put-in spot, and we would paddle down to the park's discovery centre, where our car was parked.
This was no easy paddle, even though we were paddling with the current. The river has a lot of hazards, from low water levels to rocks, and with rapids that ranged from Class I (gentle ripples) to Class III (white water with strong currents and slight drops in elevation).
One of the Class III rapids required a mandatory portage for all paddlers. There were simply too many rocks to navigate and it was just too dangerous.
DW and I were nervous about our kayaks hitting rocks but we wanted to use our own boats, rather than rent. Even though our kayaks are designed for open water, they can easily handle Class I rapids and, though tough, should be able to negotiate Class II rapids if you know what you're doing.
They aren't really recommended for use through Class III rapids.
We aren't particularly experienced in waters with rapids. We've run Class I rapids with our old kayaks but have never paddled through rougher water. We had taken a white-water canoeing course more than a decade ago and I never finished it because I got sick halfway through it. I had paddled through a set of Class II rapids in that course, but canoes and kayaks are very different beasts.
After our first set of rapids (Class I), I was very nervous for my kayak because I went over a large rock so hard that it lifted my seat up. When we saw on the map we had that the next set of rapids was Class II, we decided to stop at the portage to check it out. And when we saw that there were a lot of rocks, we decided to portage the 185 metres.
Only when we were carrying our second kayak along the portage route did we see some people in kayaks negotiate the rapids, and we saw the route that they took. They got through easily and we figured we could have, too, if we had spotted that way through.
The next set of rapids were Class III, and again we stopped at the portage spot to survey the rapids. I saw a canoeist get his craft through, and he turned in to the downstream section of the portage, so I decided to talk to him.
The man had been through these rapids the day before but had chosen a different route, and he said it had been a mistake, that he almost hit a large rock and nearly capsized. He explained the route he took this time and told me that I'd have no problem with my kayak if I stuck to this route.
He was right, and though it was terrifying going through Class III rapids in a 14-foot touring kayak, it was also exciting when DW and I got through the other side unscathed.
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| Foolishly, I forgot to wear a helmet, which was strapped to my deck for such occasions. |
Apart from the first portage we did and the mandatory portage, further down, DW and I ran all other sets of rapids. It took us four hours and 45 minutes to paddle the 20 kms back to the park's discovery centre, and we were exhausted.
My watch agreed: when I pressed the button to stop my kayaking activity, my watch actually told me that I had overexerted myself, that I'd need 96 hours to recover. And admittedly, as soon as we returned to our campsite and had dinner, I just wanted to go to bed. I slept for about 12 hours.
And of course, I didn't take 96 hours to rest. We had more paddling ahead of us.
In the 10 days of our vacation, we got into our kayaks five times. We also hiked a lot more and I'll share more of our Laurentian-Saguenay trip next week.
We returned home on Monday afternoon, and after emptying our car, putting all of our camping gear away, washing our kayaks (and buffing out some of the scratches on the bottom hull), and throwing our clothes into the washing machine, I was too tired to even think about dinner.
My Body Battery reading was at only two percent.
I've needed most of this week to recover from our vacation and I'm glad I didn't have to return to a job. It was certainly worth overexerting myself, as my watch said. It was the best paddling we've ever done through some of our country's most beautiful landscapes. We paddled in all kinds of conditions, with whales only a short distance from us in at least one case, and this will go down as our number-one paddle.
I'll have more to say on Monday and I'm currently working on editing the video footage I've captured.
Stay tuned.
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