I ended my week on such a high note I can hardly believe it. To keep this interesting to the casual reader, I’ll try and keep this short.
Spending some time with my kid sister and her two kids was fantastic. I really can’t get enough of her kids. Her 18 month toddler is just so much fun, and I’ve never had so much time to spend with a newborn—yes I even changed diapers and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was led to believe. Of course, I never had to change any seriously smelly ones. Oh man that kid does drop the occasional bomb in which hazmat suits would be ideal.
Then yesterday I had a good time hanging with one of my best friends in Lethbridge and her mom—which was totally nice if uneventful. However today was even more excellent than any day of the previous week.
It started out as one of those bland Saturday’s where even though the weather is nice, the lawn needed to be mowed, the laundry to be done, repairs made on the damage that my psycho roommate inflicted upon the house while I was gone (that’s one I’ll save for a different post), and it didn’t look like I had much on my plate that I was interested in actually doing.
But then, by the glorious miracle of the Internet, I found a group of guys that had blogged about going kayaking in less than an hour; all I had to do was show up with a boat on my Jeep.
We hit the lower St. Mary’s river which I had never been down before. Pictured below is a one of the guys that went with us and a bunch of Calgary folks’ vehicles and boats—we were all getting ready to hit the water.
The thing is, there has been a lot of rain in the last week. Apparently it rained pretty much everyday while I was gone to visit my sister. Well with lots of rain comes a high river and let me just say, wow that river was flowing! I was getting pretty confident going down it though and noticed that the other guys were all pulling off to the side, but thought, oh well I’ll just go down a bit further and pull off after a few of these big waves.
Well HELLO, the waves kept coming bigger and bigger, until I noticed that the whole river was raging around me. I found out later this was probably in the area of class four rapids. The best thing to do in a time like that is just go for it—which I did; which was awesome! I got right through them without even flipping and then parked in the eddie like a pro. The other guys were mighty impressed. Two of them followed my path and the other two opted to walk around these particular rapids.
Later one of the guys lost his boat—which looking at it now is kind of funny but I was quite worried at the time. The two more experienced boaters wanted these other two guys to come over to the shore with us so we could check out the hole around the next bend. Well I think they might have scared him slightly because while crossing he was a little unstable and then dumped. Well knowing he was in trouble he quickly bailed and didn’t even hang onto his boat. I went after him—again charging into the great unknown but at least the other guys told me to keep left. I went down this even bigger set of rapids, but this time a little less gracefully (I did it upside down)—depending on how you think about it perhaps I should get extra points for style. Luckily I flipped myself back up (after several tries) and we found his boat circling in a nearby eddie.
So to treat myself for my hard work today I made myself what I consider a perfect supper fit for a king and watched the Oilers shut-out the Hurricanes 4 to nothing, sending them to game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals and giving me the perfect ending to a perfect week.
I think I’ll start out next week with more kayaking; I’m going again tomorrow.
