Consider the river floated!

Yesterday we had a super-relaxing and fun last day floating the CDA river with Carolyn, the Poteets, and Rach. We loaded the truck up with a LOT of floating options and headed out!

One of the many entertaining aspect of our float was our footwear.... I wore an old pair of Carolyn's sweet purple Baywatch (that's right!) aquasocks, size 8 (I am a bigfoot, for those of you unaware--9-9.5 usually, so it was a squeeze!) and Bob wore some old Teva style sandals of hers that were similarly sized (he is a guys 9.5!) so our tootsies were squashed! Why do we never remember river shoes when we know we'll be floating? Silly us. Anyway, the shoes served their purpose but led to some funny looking feet!

What's happening here you may ask? That's right, my toes are making their way out.... These shoes can't even contain them!

After 4 hours of floating my toes were much closer to escaping! My right big toe was poking out a bit!

Bob's pinky toes would not be contained either!


So back to the floating.... we had a LOT of tubes and rafts!

It's an impressive pile, eh?



We had a good system--Bob would thow stuff down

And George would catch them and hand off to Rach, who'd keep them from floating away. Neither pic does it justice, but this was a STEEP path down to the water... hence the benefit of not carrying a giant floatie while we each traversed it! Everyone successfully navigated it somehow!

A nice shot of Rach, me, and Mans floating along...Note the LACK of sunburns all around...

My view of the girls! Our tied-together blob was dangerous at times, but we had a great time chatting! Sometimes we chatted and/or sang a bit too much and didn't pay close enough attention to our surroundings and would float into danger.... we had several run-ins with evil branches which attacked us! I have a plethora of scratches and scrapes from these, but it was still WELL worth it for the fun that was had! The funniest disaster from our inattention was when the riverbank started swallowing Rach! I can't even explain the craziness of that moment... too funny! At least the FRIGID water felt good on all my scrapes! Although the temp was in the high 90's, the water was icy as always so it was a funny balance between dying of hotness while atop our floaties to freezing when we'd dip our toes in to cool off! Somehow Bob and George were IN the water the whole time and didn't freeze to death... they're hardy boys! Good times were had by all....

One more piece of craziness with the floating was a particularly rough patch that was shallow, but also had a really strong current which dumped me out of my tube, so I was walking next to our blob dragging it to deeper waters so we wouldn't get stuck, but the rocks are of course very slippery, and I fell on my bum and the current grabbed the blob and they quickly floated away! I tried to chase them down but the current was really fast and the water was only to my shins so not deep enough to swim, but had a current that made it tough to stand let alone walk, so I decided to just walk along the shore a bit and catch up with them. Rach didn't want me to have to make my way alone, so she came with, but the riverbank had brush right to the waterline so there was no chance of walking along it, so we literally bushwacked our way through 30-40 feet of solid brush, which scraped us so much more... Rach made the valid observation that it wouldn't have been so bad if we weren't so naked! We were longing for jeans and long sleeves instead of our swimsuits right about then.... we made it to the road eventually and were dirty and only bleeding a little, and only a few hundred feet down the road was the end of our float where we'd parked the van, so we dove into the cold water to clean off our grime and it felt wonderful on all the scrapes at least!

We had a nice picnic lunch and then headed back.... Good times were had by all. The only downside of our floating was that it took longer than expected.... 4.5 hours to go 5 miles! And also that we all got BURNT. I applied SPF 50 from head to toe twice during this float, but still managed to get quite burned... my elbows, back and knees are the WORST so my theory is that my sunblock got rubbed off from how I was lying on the tube..... Especially since my face and shoulders are fine... Bob's knees are also FRIED to support this theory....

We got back from the river fairly late, so by the time we left town it was after 7, so we didn't get home til nearly 1am, but the drive went fast with no traffic and we enjoyed our time together as always.

We were able to go to the annual Peds vs Family Medicine softball game Saturday morning since we were home and it was a lot of fun! I played second and Bob played center field and we both played well and had a lot of fun. I had a nice hit a fair way into the outfield which was fun because who doesn't love to hit it over the boys' heads after they move in because a girl is hitting? Bob hit great too but they were expecting his long bombs and were in good position to catch them. Unfortunately, our efforts weren't enough and we lost our winning streak, losing by a LOT to the Family med folks... We had a nice BBQ at Ryan's afterward, then went home and got cleaned up, then met up with some friends for dinner at the Ram.
Now we're ready to just relax around here for the rest of the weekend! Hope you're all well.
~Cathy