"What were you thinking?
"You thought this would be fun?"
For me, that time came at about 2:45 the afternoon of Day 3 of kayaking the Great Calusa Blueway along Florida's Gulf Coast.
I was alone and slogging through a very modest chop against a 10 mph northeast breeze.
My back was killing me.
My arms were beginning to feel like Jell-O.
My thighs were aching from bracing them in the narrow cockpit of my kayak.
"Jug Creek has to be just around that point," I kept telling myself as I willed myself to keep paddling toward my destination.
Two hours later, I've had a shower, I'm sitting on the second-floor deck of the lovely Bokeelia Tarpon Inn, drinking a beer, watching pelicans crash into the sea while hunting, and I'm smiling.
I'm thinking about the time earlier today when I sat in the kayak in water barely deep enough to float the boat. I looked to my left, then scanned 180 degrees to my right and saw an arc of 25 pure-white great egrets wading in the flat.
"Wow! What a great day! And what a great trip!"
The Blueway is a roughly 190-mile kayak trail that meanders along the coast between Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, explores a few rivers, heads north along Pine Island, the largest island on the Gulf Coast, then loops around to the outer islands of Cayo Costa, North Captiva, Captiva and Sanibel, right across the pass from Fort Myers Beach.
But you don't come down here to kayak the whole 190 miles. And you don't have to be a kayak stud to do it. Sure, there are parts of the trail, like along the outer islands, that are best left to those who were born with a kayak paddle in their hands. But there are plenty of areas that can be tackled by a novice. And you can do it by yourself.
After all, in most places where I kayaked, the water's so shallow that if you fall out of your boat, you can stand up.
Another attraction here is that it's possible to kayak from hotel to hotel. During three days of kayaking, I sampled a bed-and-breakfast and two motels in Matlacha (Mat-la-SHAY) and a B&B in Bokeelia — all on Pine Island and all with docks you can kayak right up to. But there's enough kayakable water around here that I could have stayed put in one lodging and still covered different areas.
Pine Islanders proudly declare their space as a taste of "Old Florida." This is a place where restaurants remind you of a Wisconsin supper club, every meal is served with a side of smiles and all the waitresses call you honey or sweetie.
It's also an area that invites exploration. Paddle south out of one of the many canals that carve up Matlacha and you can parallel the more exposed eastern edge of the island that faces out onto Matlacha Pass. But cut inside to the sheltered flats and you find still waters where great egrets, white ibises, little blue herons and, if you're lucky, an occasional roseate spoonbill are reflected in the water as they wade on spindly legs, their beaks continually bobbing up and down as they feed.
The Blueway in most places periodically has markers to guide you, but with all of the little channels that invite you in to dally among the mangroves, it's good to carry a GPS or, in my case, an iPhone so you can see exactly where you are.
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