I've spent the last 4 days out in Lakewood, WI at my grandparent's old lake house. It was a nice, relaxing time for the most part. Some yard work, but mostly relaxing, a bit of shopping, and some fireworks.
And then there was the rafting incident...
On Friday, my sister decided she wanted to go white-water rafting. I decided it would be fun, so I agreed to go. We got there and found that there were about 100 (literally) people already prepared to go. They told us we had 5 minutes to get ready so we paid for our rafts (or "fun-yaks", as they were called), quick got dressed and hopped on the bus.
After a quick lesson in how to paddle through rocks on level-3 rapids, we carried our fun-yaks down to the river and hopped in. At first, it was fun. The first problem we encountered was the fact that the river was a little low. This meant we regularly had to hop over rocks that we got stuck on. But this was a minor nuisance.
My sister finished 5th out of about 100. She never fell out. I fell out 3 times:
1) At the first rapids, I got spun around and went down backwards. Bad idea. I flipped and went down the river a bit on my back. But, I was ok and got back in the raft.
2) A horsefly was hounding me, so I decided to try and chase him down. I eventually got him, right before I smacked into a rock, spun around and flipped because I wasn't watching where I was going. Doh! Again, I was ok and got back in, no problem.
3) At the largest falls, I ran into the guy in front of me, who had gotten stuck and spun around halfway down the falls (believe it). I ran into him (I couldn't see him since he was lower than my los), we both spun backwards, flipped and went down the falls. I smacked my left shin and knee into the rocks, and got hit in the middle of my back rather hard twice. To top it all off, I lost my glasses, even though I had the safety straps on. I think they might have snapped.
So, I came home rather battered and bruised (and sunburned), put an ice-pack on my knee for about an hour and was thankful that my vision is still good enough that I could drive home today. Still, that turned out to be one damned expensive trip.
