Adventures

When I was a kid, all I wanted was to have adventures. Pretty much all my childhood fantasies involved some wild adventure or another. My mother cut out a newspaper article for me once that recounted the story of two young girls who had survived alone in the Amazon for a long time. She thought that maybe I would want to write a story about them one day, which I still might. Who knows? But what I ended up doing was pretending I was one of the girls, surviving in the Amazon. Armed with a knife with a plastic handle designed to look like bone and carved in the shape of an elk (a gift from a mother who knew her tomboy daughter all too well), I roamed the “Amazon” (my yard), surviving on my wits alone. My major problem with the whole thing was that my yard had far too few trees to pass for a legitimate Amazon jungle. Plus, my clothes were too nice and it was too cold to go barefoot at that time of year.

I also loved to read about adventures. Every summer, we would visit the library weekly, where my sister and I would each check out no fewer than five books each, but more likely over ten (we liked to read, what can I say?). If we went to the library today, I could still show you exactly where the adventure books were shelved in the children’s section, and I could still describe the brown “Adventure” sticker on the spine of each of the books that I wanted, no, HAD to read. Survival books like My Side of the Mountain and books that even remotely related to adventures, like mysteries and anything about flying or space, became the fodder for my imagination. The desire to read about adventures has not diminished with age. I am still drawn to mysteries, travel books, historical accounts of events, and other similar grown up adventure books. The desire to have adventures has also not diminished.

This summer I am doing my final fieldwork for OT school in Alamosa, CO. My reason for this can be boiled down to two words: free housing. But that aside, Alamosa is in the beautiful San Luis Valley which is full of potential adventures to be had. Therefore, I decided to attempt to actually seek out some nice adventures to take part in, and then document them for this blog. I figure it might be fun, plus it will motivate me to get out and experience this amazing and beautiful area of the state while I am conveniently in the middle of it. It will make me have adventures, just like I dreamed of as a little girl. I am making no promises, but the blog has the word “adventure” in the title, so I think it’s an obligation that I try!