[Ed. As a matter of course, know that I started my Blogger work in 2002, however, I maintained a personal site as early as 1998. I'm slowly converting the meager posts as I get a spare moment]

Well, for those of you who couldn't make it... you missed a great time rafting in chocolate water! The recent rains in the area helped to make this trip quite a wild ride!! The normally Class I-II rapids were a brimmin' Class II-III+, and the French Broad River (FBR) was moving about 7500 cubic feet of H20 per second! (That's about 700% above normal).

To recap the trip... we took off about 8ish from the Little villa in Harrisburg N.C., and to our rendezvous in Old Fort for a bit of canning (you'd know what I meant if you were there). [Ed. 10 years have passed, and I sadly cannot recall what the "canning" was, I can only assume it was actual canning.] Then, we went across the mountain to the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC) at the FBR. Got checked in. Waited. Waited some more. (We were quite early.)

About the time the clock struck 2:40ish, we piled into a bus with a bunch of 12 year old boy scouts, some Indian computer programmers from New York and a few other cornballs. Our complement of guides was the usual granola sort you would find hanging about the river.

We boarded a six passenger raft, which held our group plus a trainee guide (Genio) and an experienced guide (Dawn). We were under the impression that the trainee would sit and watch, but to our amusement, Genio was the barge captain. He was the sort of gen-x'er who will fart around til he's 32 and decide that either he needs to get a real job, or he'll be a lumberjack.

Anyway, we rode the rapids with aplomb, except for the time Jamie fell out of the raft (I yanked her back in, but to her credit she didn't wig out at all). I also managed to wack Jamie with a paddle a coupla' times so one of the lenses of her sunglasses popped out! BJ and Jeremy had a rather uneventful ride, if you don't count being stabbed by logs and tossed around the interior of the raft!

So we spent about 2 hours on the water, filling time in between rapids with talking to our granola guides (Dawn is studying Comp Sci in Florida, but I'm sure she's squeezed a few pickup games of Hacky Sack), paddle-fighting with the cubbies, (I think we just kicked everybody else's ass...they were a pretty docile lot), bailing out the raft, and general merriment.

We put out just before the Class IV rapids, which were probably running pretty hot that day, and just managed to plow through a couple of huge holes, thanks to some rather adventurous steering by Genio. Afterward we piled back into the bus after a light snack of cub scout cookies (and they didn't even taste like cubs) and proceeded to return to NOC, where we each purchased corny memorabilia. Jamie, Jeremy & BJ got granola hats, and I got a rafting t-shirt (Slogan: You deserve a good paddling). [Ed. I remeber this tee, but think it is long gone]. I think Lara got a Snickers bar. We got photos, of course, and they'll be up when I'm good and ready!

Sorry to you weenies who couldn't make the trip. What a bunch of losers! (exceptin' if y'ins was sick)

Follow your dream! Unless it's the one where you're at work in your underwear during a fire drill.