This morning I took Rose* and two of her neighbors to Baguio City to eat lunch in a Jollibee restaurant and ride rental tricycles and a pedal boat in Burnham Park. I have wondered in previous outings if a pedaled boat would be preferable to a rowed boat, so today we went to the concessionaire who had royal blue-and-yellow pedal boats and row boats. I picked an open-top boat.
Well, the pedaling may have been easy when the boat was new, but today the mechanism had so much resistance that pedaling was a real drag. And steering by a fore-aft lever, not a tiller, was either full-left or full-right. Well, there was neutral, also. But no modulation of steering. I’d push the lever forward (not left), then center it, then left again, then center, and so on. Oh, well. The kids enjoyed themselves, but I wanted to exchange the boat for a big, blue-and-yellow rowboat.
That boat was so much more fun. It had a top – a roof – which was beneficial in the bright autumn afternoon. And the oar handles had been carved to fit hands better than other oars I’ve used. So I rowed brisky back-and-forth, around and around, visiting with other boaters, including the Nestlé ice cream vendor. You should have seen the boys’ faces; they had chocolate ice cream all around their mouths and noses.
Rose was a real water baby. She doesn’t have her older sister’s fear of the pea-green water (110cm deep), and she enjoyed sitting on the gunwales with feet in the water, choosing different seats on the boat, standing at the ornamental prow or on the stern. When I rocked the boat back-and-forth for fun, she and the brothers didn’t panic and bawl as her older sister Charlotte* did last Saturday. They enjoyed an hour on the water. They liked going fast (I got two more blisters, in different places), they liked spinning in place, they liked waving to people in other boats and on the shore, chattering excitedly to me in Filipino, eating ice cream and soaking up the sunlight.
Tricycling was fun, too. Heck, the kids even enjoy taxi rides, seated beside the doors, faces at the open windows. This outing was a real treat. The boys enjoyed lunch and recreation so much more than Charlotte did last Saturday! I was glad.
* name changed
