This weekend I spent driving, rafting & camping with friends. If I had to pick a perfect weekend activity, camping & whitewater of any kind would be my choice (with some biking thrown in!)...well...for the warmer months at least. Colder months have a whole different range of activities that I would prefer. I love sleeping in a tent. My tent's entire top half is a screen if you don't put on the rain-fly, so being able to lay there with the trees hanging over top of you...it's about as perfect as it gets.
The basic rundown of the weekend...
We left Saturday morning, loaded up and made a quick stop at the local Starbucks. Three hours of driving went by pretty quickly chatting it up with friends. We had lunch at a local Ocoee restaurant that used to be a steakhouse, but had since been bought out. The food wasn't too bad, but definitely not what it used to be. We arrived at Quest Expeditions just in time to sign our waivers, take a few pics and load up on the bus to head down to the river. We did the upper course - also referred to as the Olympic course since it was designed specifically for the kayaking portion of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Our guide was "Dobbs". He had spent 3 seasons on the Ocoee, although this was his first season running the upper. He was really nice, yet incredibly serious and intense too. He did a great job of navigating us through the course with only one "swimmer" in the middle of a class 4 rapid. I wish I could have had that whole incident on video as we were a clumsy mess!!! Josh literally "bounced" out of the boat, so our guide starts yelling commands and we are quickly doing whatever we are instructed to do. The best was when he yelled to Jon to get in the bottom of the raft, and Jon thought he was yelling it to all of us, so Jon repeated the command. The rest of us braced into the base of the raft, yet Dobbs yelled an "all forward!" so here we are, tucked in the bottom of the raft, still trying to paddle! I am laughing just thinking about how hilarious it looked! Bethany was in front of me and couldn't maintain her balance, so she's literally sprawled across the front of the raft trying to get her paddle in the water! It was sooo funny! We got a little "reprimand" from our guide for not listening clearly, but the rest of the trip was much smoother and we stayed in the boat without any problems. On a positive note, our guide did say we were "rockstars" in our paddling skillz. Hopefully that's a good thing since rockstars don't actually use paddles...
After rafting we took off for Gee Creek campground. It's a beautiful little campground right on the Hiwassee. The guys & Bethany set up camp while Stacey and I returned to the outfitters to get some firewood. That proved to be a little more complicated than we expected, but in the end, we got what we needed and headed back to camp. The guys built a fire while we got the food ready and we enjoyed the rest of the evening eating, laughing and playing cards. We even topped the night off with a little night-disc :). We had the most perfect camping weather possible and although we had one humorous middle-of-the-night moment attaching the rain fly, we slept soo good that we didn't even wake up until somewhere around 10am!
My s'more invention that I named "ree'mores" (a.k.a "remorse"). A staple of all my camping trips!
We enjoyed a quick breakfast together before cleaning up and tearing down camp. We played a little bit more frisbee (a sad attempt) and then took off once again for the Ocoee. We made a quick stop at Sonic and enjoyed eating our lunch on the rocks while watching rafts go through the Olympic course. Wish we could have gone through one more time before we had to leave. Three hours later, we were back at home, dirty & tired, but full of great memories from a weekend rendezvous. Good times!
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1 comment:
you put the ree'morse on there b/c you knew i would start craving them again, didn't you? i just knew it. thanks, that's really nice to do to a big giant preggo lady! ha ha!
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