It's More Fun if You Woo

Last week, Matt and I went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with some friends and had a fantastic time, but we learned a good lesson too.

On Wednesday (which was also my birthday!), we borrowed some boogie boards from the resort  in the morning. In our group, I was the only non-Midwesterner and the only one who had ever used a boogie board before, making me the "expert". Which is another way of saying that we sucked at it. We were too far out, our wave timing was off, and our paddling wasn't all that effective. We caught a few swells but didn't get very far. After a while we turned in the boards and headed back to the sand for drinks and naps.

Later in the day, after lunch and poolside naps, we walked back to the beach to take advantage of the breeze. The waves looked a little better than they had in the morning, but two young boys caught our attention. They had some boogie boards and were having WAY more fun than we had. We watched them for a few minutes and finally realized that these boys weren't any better at it than we were.

The only difference is that every time those boys got a push from the water, even when it wasn't a super-awesome ride, they would yell, "WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

We tried it out the next day on our adventure tour (think boats, trucks, mules, and ziplines) and it totally worked.

Lesson learned: It's more fun if you woo. 

(Disclaimer: We tried this out a few times over the week, and it generally worked, with one exception. Our final formulation of the rule was, "Everything is more fun if you woo... except diarrhea." Montezuma's revenge is stronger than woo.)