On Saturday we found ourselves back down in Englewood with Vel again. But this time, we were there to catch the annual offshore race.
Winds were high which unfortunately resulted in them cancelling the last races which would have involved what they called “Big Boats”. We saw them on their trailers ready for the day but they never made it into the water, which was a real shame.
Here are some of the pics from the parking lot and I can fully understand why the risk of high winds damaging these was the right decision to cancel their race.
In any event we still got to watch three of the earlier races with the “smaller” boats and they were still gorgeous and provided more than enough excitement to justify having gone there.
Truth is, any time with Vel is a joy anyway so even if all the races had been cancelled we would still have had a fun time.
We had a little beer and BBQ after the watching and hung with some cool people. Yes, there was a couple of the assholes that you’d expect drawn to an event like this, but in the main, they were good people.
By the time we got back home that evening we were thrilled with the day and hope sometime to get back to see the big boats in the water. I imagine that is quite a sight.
I hope you enjoy what I did get, which is at the end of the blog. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with my camera settings but it is a different experience than shooting nature so I will forgive myself this one time.
Hope you enjoy!
The thought that settled into my brain for this blog was along the lines of how sometimes we find ourselves with an opportunity to step outside of our comfort zone and experience something we normally wouldn’t.
We will often decide to stay within our own world and decline the opportunity based on some pre-disposition or bias. For example in this instance, I knew I would come across maga morons (and they were there in abundance) and be thrown into somewhat of a redneck world.
As the police officer told me earlier in my day, this was the rich end of the red-neck world where “boys with their toys” got to compare dick size to the deep roar of big engines and the thrills of an open sea.
On an intelligence level, I frown heavily on the mental acuity of such an activity, but allowing your brain to settle on that bias is both snobbish and self-defeating.
There is a lot to be enjoyed at events like these and just because we disagree with the politics or the culture, is not a good enough reason to forego it.
I loved every moment of the experience. When the Trump morons started I told them I was a staunch democrat and that talking politics wasn’t a good idea. When the country music blared loudly from the dumb pick-up truck with over-sized wheels, I just walked to a different part of the lot.
We don’t need to let our own bias and predispositions steal the joy from us to where we can only function in the reading room of the local library.
Stepping out of the box occasionally is a good decision. We find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with those on the other side. We smile along with people we otherwise deride and together (for a while at least) we get to share a common ground that seems so elusive these days.
Defining our world into factions that are black and white and always talking about the other side as being evil, is a symptom of a world that has been divided to our own detriment.
Do I wish I could have slapped some of them upside the head for their mindless beliefs? Yes. But most of them would have loved to do the same to me and felt justified in so doing. There were more of them than me anyway, lol, so that thought didn’t linger too long in my head.
I guess what I am trying to say here is that we shouldn’t spend every waking hour doing things that keep us in our comfort zone. Every now and then we should break bread with the plebs.
We might even find that we enjoy the taste of it!
… just a thought.
