Tuesday, August 5, 2008

River Rafting

Like most, I have been really excited to post this. The river rafting in Colorado is fantastic. I have never been down a more exciting run. On the left side of the boat going from front to back you have me (Sam), Jamie, and my sister Erin. On the Right you have Stranger #1, #2, and my mom. We really didn't get to talk to stranger #1 and 2 very much, so I can't remember their names. If you look at the pictures you will see what I mean.

Here is a fun bit of trivia. Stranger #1 thought that it would be a good idea to bring along his smokes. Who wouldn't be relaxed slowly rafting down the river smoking your favorite brand. Well, as you will see from the pictures not such a good idea. Instead of smoking he was soaking. (I know that was a little lame, but I put it in anyway.)

Here is your second bit of trivia. Like all good trivia, you don't have to read it because you will never need to know it, but it is worth the read.

when I was in sixth grade my writing teacher gave us an assignment where over the course of 3 weeks we had to write down six memories. Every story had a different format and had to be from a different point of view. As a cover page we were to bring in a picture that represented our life and write a one sentence motto describing what we thought was the essence of our life. I looked in my moms Good House Keeping magazine for this assignment and I saw an add for a boat. The picture was of the back of a girl's head with really long hair. Her hair was soaked and she was ringing all the water out of it. Underneath the picture it said "Life; it is not about keeping your hair dry." From the eyes of a sixth grader, this was my life's motto. (even to this day it still kind of is) I did pretty good on the writing portion I think I got something like 88%, but on my cover page I only got 4 out of 10, that is only 40% yikes. I guess she didn't understand the meaning of my life, but I want you to look through these pictures and tell me if you don't start to understand where I was coming from. Life; it is not about keeping your hair dry.

Here we just unloaded the raft and we just bearly got in the water. I don't think that anyone was really ready for it to be this intence this fast. We are coming to our first rapid and I just knew that we were going to get soaked. You will see in the picture that I am closing my mouth. Jamie and Erin saw the camara so they both put on their best smiles. :) This picture is called "And so it starts."



You can see in this next picture that everybody sort of stops paddling except for me. I don't know if I was too dumb to stop or not, but he told us to paddle forward and that he would tell us when to stop. It is hard to tell from the angle of the camara, but it was quite the drop.



Have you ever been totally enveloped by water and thought "hey, where am I" yep, that is what happened. We are still going down here.



Here we are on the way up, but still covered with water. What a trip.



Yes, we made it!



This next picture is a little further down the river. We are still getting soaked, and loving it! You will notice that my side is a little lower in the water. As you can see I am totally covered with water while stranger #1 is riding high and dry. The reason for this is because left side was strong side.



There are several more pictures that I was going to put on, but I thought that this was getting a little long. So, I will end with this one. I think that it is pretty cool. It is called "where's the boat."