Rainy Day at the River

A few weekends ago we went camping and canoeing with Lareina and Trent. We make this trip every year. This year we even planned it a few months in advance because everyone was so busy this summer. Lareina came up Thursday night and helped Billy get everything ready while I was at work on Friday. (Isn’t she so great?!?!) Friday when I got off of work we drove down to Noel, MO and setup camp at Eagle’s Nest (the same place every year). We got to play in the water a little bit but it was still a bit too chilly. Ok well for me it was. I remember waking up around 3 in the morning to a really bad storm. There has been so much rain here this year. Some of the storms have even resulted in tornados in the area. The storm that night sounded like it could easily develop into a severe storm. My first thought when I woke up to the rain was, “O, that sounds so nice!”, my next thought after the loud crack of thunder, “This is probably pretty bad.”, next thought, “O, well. There isn’t a whole lot we can do about it.”. So, I just rolled over and fell back asleep to the calming sound of the rain. When we got up the next morning it had stopped raining and we found Lareina and Trent sleeping in the Envoy. Apparently the door on the tent they used did not close, so there was a lot of water in it. the sky had cleared up a bit but it still wasn’t looking too promising. Of course we decided to go canoeing anyways. So we got all of our stuff packed up and went to check in to canoe. It was still looking a bit cloudy but we figured a little rain couldn’t hurt us. I think we were about half way in to the 6 mile canoe trip when we decided to pull over and eat our lunch. It was still cloudy at this time and we had been sprinkled on a little bit but nothing major. As we were standing on the shore eating our sandwiches, it started to POUR!! I mean, these were HUGE rain drops!! It was horrible!! Either, we could stay there on the shore and get wet (there were no trees) or we could get in the canoes and keep paddling and get finished. It did not look like it was going to let up any time soon, so, we chose to get back in the metal canoes and continue down the river. This was probably not the wisest idea considering it was lightning around us and here we were going down the river in a metal canoe! Billy paddled as fast as he could. I never once got in the water but I was dripping wet and it was so cold. We finally made it to the end and of course it cleared up on our way home. On our way home we stopped and bought hot chocolate; remember this was the end of June!!
My idea of a canoe trip is hot and sunny when it is great to get in the water, not rainy, cloudy and chilly.
I do have to say even though I was a bit grumpy about it raining, it was fun. We were still out there with friends having a good time and we laugh a lot. O and we had Tobacco with us on this float. I think he was also pretty miserable by the end of the trip.