I almost quit kayaking

+ a guide to solo car camping

I’ve been logged off lately — between work and the weather getting nice, I’ve been spending most of my time outside of work reading, writing with a pen and paper and typing it up later, going for long walks or short runs, propagating my plants, and out on the water paddling!

It feels like summer has really actually started and come next weekend I’ll be in full summer swing! I’ll be going part-time in my job at Paddling Magazine, making more time for some classic Midwest travel and focusing on other writing projects.

Solo Car Camping Guide:

It’s car camping season again Up North! That means packing up a weekend bag + your sleeping set up and headed out to explore near home. For me, the best part of a car camping adventure is that it’s perfect for checking out those state parks or national forest that are just a few hours away from you without the hassle of setting up a full tent or camping set up.

my barebones Subaru car camping set up; the Escape in A-frame camper rental based in SE Wisconsin (shot on a paid project!)

For me the car camping sweet spot is around a three hour drive — just enough to really dive into an audiobook, but not so far that it’s unreasonable to head to after work on Friday.

READ: Ultimate Guide to Solo Car Camping

I almost quit kayaking :/

I’ve started kayaking again!

Okay so I never really stopped kayaking over the winter, and most of the kayaking I’ve been lately has been bumpy water skills trainings and what not, so that means no photos and videos, for the two obvious reasons (1- I’m in a class it would be rude, and 2- I shoot mostly on my phone which is a gamble as waves pick up. I might actually invest in a GoPro or something for some more fun filming this summer. TBD).

Meanwhile now that May has started the kayak season is starting to creep back into my life and I’m really really happy about it! I’ll be doing a lot less guiding this summer (you can actually find all my trips here) and my hope is that scaling back guiding is going to help me strike a better work-life balance (of which I have none) and start kayaking primarily for fun again.

By the end of last summer, I had guided done almost ten overnight trips varying in length from 2-5 days and a handful of day and half-day trips and was feeling very done. I was tired of putting on a smile and taking people out without a chance to really connect with everyone, and I was tired of being treated like a fixture of the environment rather than a person. I had one really, really bad weekend where someone on a trip told me that since she drove up from Chicago there was no reason I shouldn’t stay late for her at work, otherwise I’d be ruining her vacation (we were already running nearly two hours late so they could see the sunset and to make up for an emergency delay earlier in the day. My co-guide and I worked from 9am to 10pm that day, all to preserve the illusion of a perfect vacations for strangers who didn’t give a shit about us).

Having a college-age girl tell me to my face that she didn’t care if I had to work more two hours late because she was on vacation was kind of it for me. I felt like I needed to be done with guiding, and frankly I wasn’t sure I was so in love with kayaking anymore.

one of the most classically pretty spots in the Apostles, Keyhole Arch. Read about how to kayak the sea caves here.

Mid-September rolled around and the guiding season came to a screeching halt and I was more than happy to lock into my more traditional desk job with Paddling Magazine.

I needed to be done guiding, at least in the way I had guided before. No more couples where the guy surprised her with a kayak trip for her birthday when she specifically asked for something else (four times last summer). No more people who drove from far away who don’t understand why the trip is cancelled for weather because it’s sunny (wind = waves. too often to count). No more vacation people who view the guide as an animatronic, the sea cave trip as a ride at Disney not a real, high-risk outdoor activity (50% of all day trippers).

And don’t get me wrong, most people are great. I’ve had so many wonderful moments and genuine connections with people out on the water, but last year was it for me commercial guiding, and it almost ruined kayaking for me too.

Two weeks ago after I left an sea kayak instructor workshop early because I was tired of another participant talking to me (the only girl) like I was 12 and an idiot my partner Andy looked at me and said “it’s supposed to be fun you know. Are you having fun?”

It’s supposed to be fun

Oh, right. Somewhere in the hauling water and grinding on overnights, the people who were rude on account of their vacation, the skills classes and all, I forgot that it’s supposed to be fun, even for me.

They say do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life which may be true to a point. On the other hand though, do something you love for work and you might just suck the joy out of your every waking moment. Last summer was a little joy-sucking.

But I believe it doesn’t have to be that way.

This summer I’m doing things differently. I’m only running a handful of guided trips — partly because writing has no most definitely become my “real” job and I just don’t have the time, and partly because I just know I need to take a step back from guiding. Running the women’s trips is different — it’s mostly solo travelers who want to make friends with each other. They tend to all be tough in different ways, even when they don’t know it and be out there for the adventure of it, not just because they wrote it on a bucket list. Moreover, the women’s trips and the people I’ve met on them through Instagram and Substack tend to always be people I want to be friends with and make the work part of the trip fun. (If you’ve been on one of these trips and are back in the area and wondering if you should ask if I want to get coffee with you I do!! Please ask! And of course I remember you!)

The other thing I’m doing is I’m going to be paddling for me, and doing adventures just for me. I need to take the parts of it that are work and hauling other people’s gear and cooking for them out of the equation and remember what it’s like to cook on your jetboil and sleep on just a sleeping bag in the sand with your friends under the Northern Lights.

It can be really, really fun out there. I need to get that feeling back for me, rather than spend another full summer creating that magic for other people.

Hey-o! I literally wrote this on Sunday morning and it has not been proofread. the typos add character I swear.

A note on paid subscriptions:

You may have noticed paid subscriptions have looked a little different lately than they used to! When I first started writing, paid subscriptions made up a key part of my income and basically made it possible for me to spend any time writing at all. I wrote a lot of paywalled essays, and had eBooks available for subscribers only.

Since then, thanks to the support of paying subscribers, integration of affiliate links, and just more paid gigs working out for me, I’ve been able to move away from paywalled content and make outdoor resources like eBooks free to everyone! Toss your email above, and you’ll get free eBooks on Midwest Adventure emailed to you!

My goal is always to provide top-notch outdoor content to everyone, making the outdoors more accessible.

Recently, I’ve pretty much phased out paywalled writing completely. I’ll probably still put out an occasional subscribers-only essay, but I truly prefer to write for everyone whenever I can!

Moving forward you’ll continue to see less pushing of paying subscriptions and more “free for everyone” content. Paying subscriptions still help support content creation and keeping eBooks free (and buying kayak guide friends meals lol), but I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re missing out by not being a part of that list.