A few weeks ago, Nick & I were chatting with our friends, kdot & cas, and thought… hey, we should all go to Whistler together.
So, I managed to score my Dad’s condo for the weekend, and a weekend was planned! Sadly, the day before we were supposed to leave… cas had a pretty nasty wipeout on his bike, and his doctor recommended staying home with his leg elevated. Crap. Rather than come with us, and be super depressed and bored every time we left to go do something Awesome, he decided to stay home and play video games. So… here we are!
Today, we went on a pretty awesome canoe trip. They shuttled us from Green Lake to Alta Lake, and we paddled back to Green Lake. You may recall our last canoe trip last year was just a few hours tooling around Green Lake. So, we thought we could upgrade things a little…
and holy crap! NARROW FREAKING RIVER! Canoes, especially the 3 person canoe we had, corner like particularly wallowing bathtubs. We hit a fast moving section, got a little turned around, and a kayaker came up. She had dumped herself, and for some IDIOTIC reason … decided it was a good idea to GRAB THE SIDE OF OUR CANOE to right herself.
Unsurprisingly, this poured us directly into the river. There was a moment of panic when the dog would NOT get out of the canoe, and tried to crawl under the seat — note the canoe was upside down or on its side at this point, and she still wanted to be in it. But we got her untangled pretty quickly, and all was fine — then it was just a matter of getting all of our gear, paddles, the canoe, and the dog to the shore. Luckily, it was just over waist deep at that point.
So, we had a nice little break. Good news: The things that could be water damaged were in a waterproof bag they’d given us — like Nick’s 12 hour old $2k camera. Phew. Sadly, our lunch, in a soft sided cooler, was not so lucky. Well, my bananas survived at least. And the diet coke. Can’t live without the diet coke.
Anyway, we got righted soon enough and after a break to dry off/wring out our shoes, we were off and running. Glad I wore my bathing suit underneath, I ended up shucking the shirt (and loading up on sunscreen) and dried quite quickly.
It was totally awesome. Dumbass kayaker, but whatever. Now we can say that we’ve had a good dump in the river, and it wasn’t our fault!
She really was particularly dumb, too. As we were trying to gather everything up, she kept trying to help. By getting her kayak in such a place that we couldn’t secure the canoe at all. No, please. Really. You’ve done enough. Also, your presence is making the scared dog even more scared. Justice had her lifejacket on too, but even so she was shivering like crazy as I carried her from the middle of the river to the edge. but that might be cuz it was cold, too. Once we got out, she went directly to one of her “I need to handle this!” coping mechanisms, and starting gnawing on a stick. Good dog.
We have a few battle wounds from our adventure. Kathryn has a set of scrapes on her shoulder from where Justice tried to go THROUGH her when the canoe went over, Nick has a nice branch scrape on the back of
his neck, and I’ve got a very pretty knot on my foot… but we couldn’t stop laughing about the absurdity of the situation, so all is good.
Pictures forthcoming — thankfully, the camera was kept bone dry. But I’ll upload those later when I’m not on a netbook with stolen wifi. (Stolen wifi tastes like candy!) Stolen wifi still tastes like candy, but now there are pictures!