river rafting recoil, recount
<< Jul 11, 2005 @ 19:54 >>
Saturday. Saturday was Emily's birfday celebration, despite the fact her birfday isn't actually until tomorrow. Like on her 21st birfday, we floated down the Cannon River this year as well. There were fifteen of us, and we all rented our tubes, and packed our beer and sandwiches, and took the dusty bus ride up stream. Then we tied together to form a massive circle and floated coolers inside the loop. It was hot and sunny, and definitely a perfect day to float for three hours while cracking open a few cold ones. Well, more than a few.
It wasn't without mishap, though. In fact, I was the first to go. We must have been five minutes into our journey when we hit some rapids that took you down a branch to the left. We happened to rotate such that my tube was at the very back of a squashed oval, basically acting as an anchor in the very shallow rocky water. My tube was also previously twisted upside down, and the stress was finally too much, so I flipped over backwards and the rubber snapped into a lower entropic state. The group got surprisingly far ahead of me, and despite being free to swim downstream, I didn't get back to my tube until the river slowed down significantly. I was fairly lucky though. Others got dragged along the river bank through root systems, or rammed into stumps. Tim and another kid ran straight into a very large rock and were both dislodged from their vessels.
At the end of our journey we cooked up some hot dogs and hamburgers, and I pretty much slept on the shoulder of Emily's roommate Danni the whole ride home. Well, sometimes I was just pretending to sleep so I could hear them gossiping about me.
Back at Emily's apartment we went and got the necessary goodies for margaritas, and while I usually don't like them frozen, Emily's smoothie machine can seriously crush ice. Ice that we too quickly ran out of. There's tons of margarita mix and tequila leftover because we ran out of ice so quickly. Probably for the better. Last time we went down the Cannon River we took Emily out to Benihana and also got the margaritas going afterwards.... and well, the end results were not pretty. It involved me being woken up in a concrete stair well.
Anyway, nobody, yes that's right not even me, was desparate enough to drink warm margarita mix with tequila in it. Not gonna happen. So, we all ordered way too much Chinese food at Village Wok instead. Mine was fine, but it coulda been a bit more flavourful. I think I'm way too used to Thai or something.
Danni and I had chatted a lot floating down the river. Emily ended up leaving us alone when she decided to take Timmy home. I didn't, and still don't, know Danni very well so we spent a good amount of time talking. Not really kidding around so much as exploring eachother's world view. I know I don't have much free time to spare, and it is gonna be a problem. I also didn't want to let down Emily and her birfday goals. Danni's got a bunkbed in her room... hmmmm maybe bunkie would be a good nickname.... anyway so I took the top bunk, and she had the bottom bunk, and we had a slumber party.