Weekend was a blast!

So most of the campers went Friday night, but three of us were waiting until Saturday morning to leave. One of the two girls showed up around 7am at my apartment to leave. The other was MIA. Never heard from her, and neither of us had her phone number. We left after waiting half an hour for her, 'cause we were on a tight schedule. (That delay ate up all our buffer, and we cut our time close for our reservation for rafting!) Snooze, you lose, I guess.

We met at a little restaurant out in the middle of nowhere for an early lunch. Food was spectacular, and the waitress was really nice. We showed up at the rafting outpost with no time to spare! We immediately jumped on the bus and hitched a ride upstream to enter the Hiwassee River (Class I & II rapids)...dang was that water COLD! I had a 1-person inflatable kayak. I had to sit indian-style, so I ended up with sunburns on the inside of my knees! It looks really weird. We had a great group kayaking, 5 individuals, then a couple in a 2-person kayak. It was so much fun to be able to float alongside my friends and just chat, then go down some rapids, get unstuck from the rocks I inevitably would find, and then have several splash-fests with the paddles! (I was usually the instigator...hehe) I found it interesting that the women were the ones who more readily joined in the splashing...I guess we just have a more vicious spirit!

We headed back to camp, where the latecomers set up tents. Apparently we missed out on a significant chapter in the story by not being there the previous night because they almost killed some teenagers in the camp next door. I heard those kids must've been drunk, trippin' or both. There was a fire, flammable liquids, and then a gas can caught on fire, big pop, a girl named Melody wailing because her boyfriend (who was there) told her that he had cheated on her with another girl who had better boobs than her...that all lasted until 4am. Then at 6am, some other campers finally woke, still irritated from the commotion of the teens from the night before, and decided to retaliate by blasting country music and making their car alarm go off again and again and again while shouting their mock conversations at each other.

So we're settling in, getting to know the family members of one of the coworkers that came, chattin' up a storm...gettin' the fires going when it got dark. One guy grills a couple steaks...hehe...and just as he's grabbin' one to serve it, it falls on the ground. Oh, I 'bout died laughing. Thankfully he was amused, too, because apparently this wasn't the first time he's done that while camping.

This morning we got up and made breakfast burritos and coffee. We packed up camp before heading down to raft the Ocoee River (Class III & IV rapids). There was a significant rock slide there recently that destroyed a section of the flume that regulates the river volume, and also changing a bit of the rapid landscape. And due to the unregulated water, the water level was really high so the rapids were big, but harder for us to surf in them to play around some. What counts was we got soaked. We got to jump out of the boat and swim one part of the river, and that was a lot of fun, too. The water was cold, but felt great. I wasn't ready to get back in the river when the time came. Finally, we got to offer first aid to a kayaker because he scraped up his hand pretty good.

After this, we loaded up, and headed home. This was a good weekend. Don't ask me for pics 'cause I didn't take any...I was too busy having fun.