Another successful float, in the books.  Yeah, we got rained on a bit, but after the monsoon conditions we’ve endured the last few years nobody was complaining.  (Actually everybody was complaining, just not about the weather for once.)  The trip started on Wednesday evening, when I met up with Munkirs & Bruce out in Grandview.  We consolidated vehicles and started the arduous trek southeast, finally getting there some five hours later.  When we arrived we found a pretty sizable crowd already on site.  We quickly located our sect by the rather hulking presence of Zim’s brand spanking new motor home, and commenced to campin’.

Thursday morning I peeled my carcass off Zim’s floor, stepped over a few still-inert bodies, and walked out the door to find a beautiful morning waiting.  It was an easy decision to get on the river this day, certainly couldn’t pass up the weather.  (Turned out we were at least partially duped, as it rained on us a bit;  Not bad though.)  We enjoyed some breakfast sandwiches and got on the river at the crack of noon with a small four-canoe barge.  We floated from camp down to Dawt Mill that day, which was about the right length, especially considering our late start.  Highlights of the trip included seeing some bald eagles, and the “river dog” story.  To summarize the River Dog tale:  We’re merrily floating along, maybe half-way downstream, and we come up on another large bunch of our group.  They’re taking a break over on the bank, and there’s this brown dog running around with them.  The dog sees our barge and immediately dives in the river, swims over to us, and starts circling our canoes.  The other group starts laughing at us, and saying “He’s yours now!”  Hmmmm, what’s that mean?  I kid you not, that dog swam with us for at least two miles, until we finally hauled him in a canoe.  Turned out he’d been swimming with the other guys for quite a while too.  (And we quickly figured out why they wanted to get rid of him;  He’d been skunked pretty good.)  So, end of story, we took him back to camp and a few guys drove him back up river looking for his home.  A few campground owners said he was a stray that had been hanging around for a few months.  He was a good dog, (Aussie maybe?) and one of the guys ended up taking him home.  After all that excitement, we settled in for a tasty chicken dinner and called it a day.

Friday we got around a little earlier, as we were planning to head up to Hammond Camp and float back down.  It’s two miles longer than the trip down to Dawt, so we have to plan for, ohhhhh, about an extra three hours.  The weather was top-notch again, and quite a few guys turned out for the trip.  Munkirs and I quickly settled in the center of a good sized barge, with a generous five-canoe buffer on either side of us.  For those not familiar with the fine art of barge-canoeing, this is generally recognized as the safest place to be.  You really can’t effectively “steer” eleven canoes lashed together, so they sort of pinwheel down the river, and the canoes closest to the outside tend to absorb the most punishment.  What we hadn’t planned on was being tied up next to Todd and Bruce.  It’s a tight race as to which one of them has the worst luck in a canoe;  Suffice to say I don’t believe either of them has ever stayed dry an entire trip down the river, and there is usually a lot of collateral damage involved with their mishaps.  (Whose bright idea was it to throw them in a canoe together anyway???)  Sure enough, not too far down the river, they hit a rock full on and punched a 12″ hole in the bottom on their canoe.  Good grief.  On one hand, one could term that sheer bad luck.  On the other hand, why is it always the same guys?  I’m suspicious.  With their vessel out of commission, we agreed to haul Todd the rest of the way down the river.  Well, maybe “agreed” isn’t the right word;  He wedged his boots into the side of our canoe and we couldn’t pry him out.  After all the shuffling and re-barging, we ended up on the very outside position, doomed to an afternoon of getting slammed off rocks and trees.  Further proof that no good deed goes unpunished.  The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful though, if a bit painful.  I snapped a few pics of our day Friday, and even got them posted already.

We got back to KC on Saturday afternoon, and I spent the rest of the weekend nursing my various wounds.  For Easter, we met up with both our families at The Well for a very passable brunch.  After a weekend of camping, a big meal was just what I needed.