Whitewater Rafting!

This is probably the fifth time I've gone whitewater rafting. Went twice out west (once when we were returning to the U.S. after three years in Belgium & once when my parents lived in Colorado), once in Maine (the weekend following 9/11/2001, with friends from Boston), and once in West Virginia (with friends from D.C., during the sniper attacks).

But this was my first rafting trip in New York. As always, rafters are a photogenic bunch, a stunning cross between the Michelin Man and Evel Knievel (photo taken by fellow-rafter Laurie):


You will notice that the guides never get caught wearing these ridiculous outfits. Thus the rafters get crushes on the guides, but never vice versa. (Although our guide, Mike, told us that he once guided a raft of models. I imagine that the bulk of the life jackets helped them pass for a normal weight. So they may have remained attractive in the rafting garb - if so, they would be the big exception.)

But I digress. The fact is, on a rainy Saturday morning - during a torrential downpour - 8 of us from the greater New York metropolitan area packed up whatever camping gear we could find and trundled off by subway (NYC folk) and car (NJ folk) to a central meeting point (Manhattan). Despite a crummy forecast (rain, rain, and more rain, the whole weekend), we all got into a caravan of NJ drivers and drove 4 hours north to a camp site near Lake George. By the time we got there, fortunately, the rain had let up, and it was merely menacingly overcast (not to mention damp). In those surprisingly auspicious conditions, we set up two rented tents.

Yes, as city slickers, we naturally had to rent tents from EMS (one of the trip planners had to rent a sleeping bag as well!), and didn't necessarily have a lot of experience in putting them up. But we muddled through OK - the modern technology really makes it very easy to put together a tent that will stay dry during the rain.

Once we figured out how to put together a behemoth six-person tent, it was a piece of cake to put together a two-person pup tent:


We did a good job with the tents, if I do say so myself. It drizzled overnight (around the time that some of our camping neighbors got into a heated argument and decided to impress each other with pyrotechnics and unimaginative swear words), but we stayed perfectly dry.

On Sunday morning, we woke up shortly before the alarm went off, due to the loud cawing of a murder of crows. You may be wondering why a group of crows is a "murder" (rather than a "flock" or "herd" etc.) -- it is because once two or three are gathered together, they start with their CAW, CAW, CAW, and it is loud, obnoxious, and unending at ungodly hours of the morning. This makes you want to murder them. Oh, come on, you don't want the "real" etymology, do you??

Re-packing the tent bags at the end proved more difficult than putting up the tents. Luckily we were able to put more than one person on the job:

When we finally got out on the water, the weather actually got sunny (picture taken by fellow-rafter Laurie):
It was a lovely day on the river, complete with small rapids, big waves, lazy flat stretches, and a great big rock for all of us to climb up and jump into the water. Wheeeeeeee - brrrrrr!!!