Colorado River rafting
July 28, 2009

Yahoo! Our first trip on the mighty Colorado, and only our second raft trip ever. What better place to be on a hot day than on the water and that’s exactly where we were all day. Well, actually I was in the water for a good part of day. Even when not in the river, a person remained very wet because of all the water wars. We went with Canyon Voyages, a choice we were happy with. They brought along an oar boat for those who wanted to just sit, a couple of paddle boats for those who wanted to get in on the action of rowing and four inflatable double kayaks that we took turns with.

Chris and I started in the kayaks. The inflatables handle very differently than our sit-on-top boats, but we managed to maintain a fairly forward motion and didn’t dump going through the rapids. We did think they were harder to deal with. There was no water over a Class 2, no problem even for the kids along on the ride.

This trip gave us plenty of time to swim alongside the boats, which I enjoyed very much. My swim suit will never be the same though, methinks after trying to rinse out the muddy water from it. Next stop is the springs at Pagosa; maybe that will wring out the mud and replace it with mineral water.

The half-day people were put out before lunch and replaced by the afternoon half-dayers. Second shift was almost entirely French folks. We were served a nice lunch on the beach.









In fact, at all the sites we’ve visited in Utah, we have encountered more French than anything, I think. This RV park does have a lot of Germans, though. We met one amiable fellow from Dusseldorf last night.

And . . . we met another one - grandparents RVing with grandkids, this time a couple with four young’uns from approximate ages six through 12, and they’ve been out for a month so far, 6,000 miles with 1,400 to go, clear back to Corpus Christi. Maybe there’s something to this whole thing . . .

We learned from our river guide that the tamarisk beetle is actually from Japan, not Egypt as we were told yesterday.

Today was the one-month anniversary of Dad’s passing. We had a good cry this morning, missing him. If he were still with us, I would be making my daily call to him and telling him that I went rafting on the Colorado. He would say, “No kidding?” always seeming to be incredulous at the things we do.

One little boo-boo I made when we set up here: first I remove the sway bar from the trailer hitch and lean it up against the trailer. So far, so good. Next I start lowering the front jack to level the trailer. Oops, what was that pop I just heard? Hmmm, seems I leaned the sway bar in an unfortunate place and popped a hole in the trailer siding. So now we’ve run off to the hardware store for that handy-dandy JB Weld. It is, after all, a small hole now hopefully weathertight.

Best sign of the day: “Flue shots - chimney cleaning”.