Float Trip

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Friday after work I picked up the girls and we headed home. The next couple hours we packed up a cooler, packed up the van, made and ate dinner. Jon and Jendra came over and eventually we left the kids with Jendra and we went to pick up Tony. We loaded his stuff in the van and headed down to Noel, MO for our float trip.

It was dark before we got there but luckily Amanda had gone down early and found us a great spot. We checked in and set up tents and stuff. We had some beers and made ourselves at home. A little after midnight we went to bed. In the morning we got up around 8 and got busy cooking breakfast and packing for the river.

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Jon fried up a bunch of bacon and eggs on a little fire and we ate it up. We squeezed all our beer and food into 1 big cooler and brought along another bag with everything else in it. We brought a ton of beer, a lot of water/tea/lemonaid plus some sunscreen, hats and fun stuff.

We were staying at Elk River Floats and the place was packed and everyone wanted to get on the river. It seemed like it would take forever but we actually got our tickets pretty quick and jumped on a buss in no time. They also go us on the raft very efficiently. I made our reservations really late and they were out of 6 person rafts when I called but they offered us an 8 person raft at the same price. This was great. We had a bunch of room.

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None of us had done the raft instead of canoe before but were excited to try it and not let down. We put the big cooler in the middle, stuck a bluetooth speaker in a ziplock on top of it, started some music, opened some beers and started floating.

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The river was full of rafts. It would have been terrible with kids and stuff but for us it was great.

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We actually did not spend a lot of time in the raft.

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We were swimming, throwing the football, rope swinging, visiting other rafts, and screwing around.

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We did not paddle much we mostly had a few people swimming around pushing or pulling the raft.

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or floating around it.

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I spent a lot of the day throwing the football around and jumping off logs and the shore and things catching it. My shoulder was pretty sore the next morning. Jon had smoked a bunch of chicken and for lunch we wrapped it up in burritos. I was busy throwing the football and didn’t know it was lunch until I was called over with a burrito ready for me. It was so good. We took a good lunch break and lots of other breaks, because you need breaks when you are relaxing in a giant floating raft all day.

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The raft was pretty impossible to tip over and you could jump off it into deep water or attempt to run in circles around the outside.

I think it was right around 6 or so hours after we launched that we caught site of the bridge next to our campground.

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When we got back we were out of beer, water, tea, Gatorade, wine and food. We were all ready for a drink, dinner and we were ready to relax.

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We warmed up more smoked chicken and fried up some potatoes and made BBQ sandwiches w/ fries and corn on the cob.

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After dinner we were sweaty, hot and smoky so we went for a little swim and watched lots more boats still coming off the water. We were exhausted and struggled to stay awake until it got dark. At 9 I gave up and went to sleep.

In the morning everyone felt a bit sore and sunburned but otherwise great. We made big breakfast burritos and packed up the campsite. It was sad to go but we were so worn out we were ready to head home.

Once home we did a lot of unpacking and cleaning up. We had some great BLTs for lunch and fish for dinner. We ran to the hardware store and worked on some home projects and car projects and even went out for icecream and the park.

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It was a great weekend

 

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