Retired and Loving It!: July 2009

We are not even in the rafts yet and the water fight has begun!

Dave gets Jimmy D.

Squirting the Hellgate boat.

Thanks Jimmy D. He sneaked up on me. That water is cold!

Floating through Hellgate Canyon.

Dave jumped out of the raft in Hellgate Canyon. He just wanted to be able to say he swam it.
It's 100 feet deep here.

Going on down the river.

This is me, having a great time. I almost didn't do this trip. I am soooo glad I did!

This is Dave.

This is Craig, Pat's husband.

This is Pat.

This is Diane.

This is Ron, Diane's husband.

We elected Larry to be our stern guy. He has been on this river and the American River several times. He did a great job. At one point we went through a rough rapid and the front end and back ends of the raft came together in a V and Larry was flipped head over heals into the river. Thank goodness we had practice getting someone back in the boat when Dave took his swim. It isn't easy.

They said they were wimps (not supposed to get wet) but we got them anyway.

They are loading up their water guns. We are about to get drenched. I love it!

And the race is on.

Going through the canyon.

We never could shake Neil and his crew. Dave was always trying to ram them.

We finally got tired of being drenched by mega blasters, so we decided to get ahead of these two boats and take the lead. We were being blasted from front and back.

This is not the worst rapid we went through. The last one looked liked Niagra Falls. We went barreling through and came to an abrupt stop on a large rock. Dave had gotten his leg caught between the rock and the bottom of the raft. Everyone but me was thrown into the bottom of the raft. When Dave freed himself the boat came loose, he then climbed quickly back into the raft because we had more rapids to go through. His foot was swollen for a couple of days, but is much better now.