Excelling at watersports, like aging gracefully or enjoying dried fruit, requires acceptance of pruny fingers. Outfit yourself for aqua play with today’s Groupon: for $75, you get a one-hour weekday paddleboard rental and introductory lesson for two at Great Lakes Board Company (a $150 value). This Groupon expires on September 16.
Great Lakes Board Company provides the knowledge and tools for standup paddleboarding, in which participants stand on a board and use a single-bladed paddle for rowing. Grab a friend or chemistry lab-mate to share in the experience, which features a picturesque view of the Chicago skyline. Great Lakes' enthusiastic instructors first spend 10–15 minutes going over basics and techniques, illuminating how to stand on the board, direct its course properly, and effectively bat away low-flying weather balloons. Standup paddleboarding strikes a balance between surfing and kayaking, using equipment that can be used for surfing alone, even on Lake Michigan or in a particularly forceful city fountain. After the lesson, pupils spend 45–50 minutes practicing their newly acquired skills, working out bodies from head to toe while occasionally pausing to restyle hair with wet sand.
Groupon Says
The Groupon Guide to: Bird Watching
There's nothing more peaceful than spending a day in a forest observing birds feeding their young or building a nest out of discarded pizza crusts. Before you embark on your next bird-spying mission, brush up on the basics:
- Packing light ensures you'll have plenty of space to bring birds home with you, which makes future bird-watching trips as easy as letting them out of your backpack so they can hover around your basement.
- Learn birdcalls to dupe the birds into coming to you. Birds usually won't approach you because the sight of a human reminds them that some of their ancestors once betrayed their avian roots by evolving into featherless, flightless homunculi.
- Binoculars will become your best friend on the trip, as your actual best friend will likely be pricked by a bird's razor-like, toxin-producing stinger. If your binoculars are encased in a tumbled-leather protector, clutching them in a moment of fear will feel no different that clutching your friend, should he or she have been heavily tanned.
- Record your findings using the field guide, either by writing in the margins or ripping out the pages to create a papier-mâché cast of its body.
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