My Amazing Year- January

For those of you who do not know, this has been a pretty amazing year. Each month I have had at least one AMAZING and incredible experience. I didn't really plan it. Most of them were last minute things that just happened to work out but then after several months I felt like I had to continue through the rest of the year. However, I'm starting to run out of extremely awesome things I can do that are 1- affordable and 2- logistically possible (i.e. I cannot go on a spontaneous trip around the world in a sailboat today because I have to give tours this week at the Capitol). So I thought I would go ahead and post what I have. Post any suggestions if you have any.

January- SCUBA DIVING/Bonaire 

I'm OK!

SCUBA Diving 

So not only did I get my SCUBA certification, get college credit for getting my SCUBA certification but I got to do it in Bonaire, a small island off the northern coast of South America, about 100 miles from Venezuela.

Wofford has a really awesome program called January Interim. For the month of January, students take one class that is typically a little (or a lot) more fun than your typical college class. Wofford offers a wide variety of classes both on campus and off. It is practically impossible to not find something that interests you. In my four years we had everything from knitting and sewing to dancing to trips to Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. There are trips that are gone for most of the month, some that stay on campus for the entire month, and some that are there some and gone some. Ok this is starting to sound a little like a Dr. Seuss book so I'll move on.

Buddy Dive Resort, Bonaire 

So for my senior year I got to do an interim that I had been wanting to do since I was a freshman, SCUBA diving. I had been SCUBA diving once in the Bahamas the summer before my senior year of high school, and I loved it! Unfortunately, my brother liked it but wasn't crazy about it and neither of my parents are big fans of being underwater for quite so long and did not want me to get certified by myself. Needless to say, this had been something I had been looking forward to for quite some time and it was well worth the wait. Just so you don't think that we got off completely easy, I will add that we had to do a lot of work in our class at Wofford before we headed off to the coast of South America. We had class in the morning at 9 learning about the different types of fish we would see, the ocean and ecosystem, and stuff like that. After lunch we had time to read and study scuba diving textbook. Then in the late afternoon we had our SCUBA diving certification class for the written work where we watched videos, took tests, and discussed what we had learned. Once class was dismissed we had about an hour to eat dinner, grab our swimsuits and gear and head to the YMCA for the pool part of the scuba diving class which would usually last until about 11 pm or so. All in all it made for some very long days leading up to our trip but it was well worth it once we got to Bonaire.  

Just in case you forgot what it looked like. Can't believe we got credit for this!
Oh and did I mention it's January?

Once in Bonaire, life was a little more relaxing. We were there for a week. One beautiful, glorious week. We were "required" to go on at least one dive a day but no one really had a problem meeting that requirement. Every morning we would eat breakfast, load the trucks or boat with our tanks and other gear, and go dive. 

Riding in the back of the truck on the dirt roads of Bonaire

Normally I'm a boat person. I love boats! But here in Bonaire one of my favorite things (as well as most other people's too) was riding from dive to dive on top of the tanks in the back of the pickup trucks. It is the best way to take in the beautiful scenery and the cool island breeze.

I think I went on all but 2 of our dives and logged more than 15 dives that week including a night dive, a deep water dive (100+ feet), and a wreck dive. We dove both from boats and shore dives and saw so many amazing and incredible things. The colors of the reef are so unimaginably beautiful, no picture can ever do them justice. It blows my mind just thinking about it.

After an amazing trip like this, I really didn't think any thing else would even come close to being as awesome. I was wrong.