River Rafting

Bryan and I along with 22 of our friends took off on Friday afternoon for an adventurous outdoor weekend at the Rafting Company in Steelville, MO. You would think that it would be a relaxing thing to go camping for a weekend, but not for us Brownes. First of all, it was the first weekend we would be away from Emmerson, so I was anxious about that. It was not easy leaving her Friday morning when I went to work... I had managed to get the emotion out of me on Thursday night, so I was ok with the crying the rest of the weekend. When I started crying Thursday night about how much I was going to miss her, you should have seen Bryan's face; he was starring at me in awe, wondering how it is even possible to cry about something that didn't happen yet. I never cease to amaze the poor man! Second, we literally had to start packing on Wednesday so we would be ready to head down the second I got off work on Friday. So we were tired before we even left!

Once we arrived about 4:30 Friday afternoon, we had minimal set-up to do at our campsite and I hurried into my swimsuit and hit the beach... if you can call a rocky area next to a small river a beach. The water was pretty chilly, but that didn't keep me from enjoying the sun and playing some catch football (I still have a pretty good spiral)! The excitement on Friday started when we were back at the campsite playing "shoulders", and I guess we were getting increasingly louder and louder, and the security man didn't seem to like it. He harassed us all night about our noise level even though the campsite right next to us was every bit as loud. The difference? We were all about 25 years younger than our lovely loud neighbors, so can I say discrimination? Oh well, at least we managed not to get kicked out!

After a chilly night and me being forever grateful to myself for remembering a sweatshirt, we woke up Saturday to some drizzle and absolutely no sun. All was good though, we got on the bus ready for the unknown and by the time they dropped us off for our 5 mile float the sun was shining and we were ready to have some fun. It is very important to understand that float trips with my friends are not relaxing... me coming home with about 10 bruises might explain the level of excitement we kept going all day. I think I got tackled out of the raft like 5 times... by boys... big ones, too!

There are always interesting characters on the backwoods rivers in central Missouri. You can always count on getting thrown free jello shots and someone always has about 200 strings of beads ready to throw out. It never fails that someone is going to get so inebriated they can't walk and everyone loses at least one thing they came with, especially flip flops. People act like they are animals in the wild with no boundaries and way too much alcohol to keep them in this false sense of self... and sparingly, it's an amazing time. haha.

After the float we were all exhausted, some were tired because they actually spend the day navigating the 4 rafts, others were tired because of lack of sleep the night before. I was tired because after the 5th time I got tackled out of the raft, I swam just about the rest of the way. Gotta love a good workout on vacation, right? That evening we enjoyed some s'mores; my specialty and camping obsession. And managed to all squeeze in around our little fire and just relax. I woke up Sunday to our camp disappearing as everyone was eager to get home, but no one was as excited to get home as I was... I couldn't wait to see my baby girl!