ani

Camping, Rafting, and Funness
2006-04-30 @ 9:40 p.m.

OK. So another amazing weekend....though this one was a little different. Friday Mal's parents were coming up and bringing her friend Sam from home. Originally we were just planning on going out to the movies, but we ended up deciding to go to Church St. We were pregaming, and that was so much fun we ended up not going to the party at all. We did go to Italian Supreme for pizza. We made a new friend too. Well, it was someone I already knew, but no one else did. So that was fun. After we walked to this really old cemetary. Mary and I were walking through but Mal and Sam were too scared. By that point we were all exhausted so we just went home.
The next morning I had to get up kind of early to go white water rafting. I packed up all my stuff and kristen and I headed over about fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave. When we got to the gym though, almost no one else was there. People slowly filtered in, but one girl didn't show up. We ended up spending almost an hour looking for her and we left almost an hour and a half after we were supposed to. I was in a car with Kristen, this girl Amy from my french class, and these girls Meg and Carly. Everyone was really nice. When we got there, everyone thought we were lost, but it turned out there was just a typo on the directions. Once we figured out where we were supposed to be, we got there without incident.
We were camping out behind the rafting place which was also the owners backyard. We set up our tents. I was with Kristen, mal's friend from home Brian, and these two twins, Stephanie and Cassandra. We had planned on going hiking that day, but since we got there so late, we just played around. There were several games of frisbee, the throwing of a football, the kicking of a big rubber ball, some games of human knot. It was so funny because we were talking about how at summer camps it's sometimes hard to get kids to do that kind of stuff and us, a bunch of college kids, just chose to do it.
At some point it got cold and a fire was built. The rest of the night pretty much was spent around that. Everyone was really nice and cool. I met so many new people. I love doing that. We cooked hotdogs on sticks and ate s'mores and played Mafia. We went to bed fairly early. The only bad part of the trip was that it was really cold. It got down to freezing. I had on a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, a fleece, jeans, sweatpants, and two pairs of socks. I curled up inside of my sleeping bag. Brian came in after me and he said he thought I wasn't even there because I was so hidden.
Waking up pretty much sucked, but we had a fire going and drank hot chocolate and ate hot cereal, so we warmed up. A bunch of other groups showed up and we all got wet suits and pfds and helmets and paddles. There was a bus ride and some instructions. We all chose rafts and got on our way. I got to be in front which I think that's more fun. Our raft worked really well together and our guide was really cool. We got to go over some Class V's which are the biggest they get without being life-threatening. The scale only goes up to VI and that's, like, Niagra Falls. We named our raft Team Scream cause we screamed everytime we got to a rapid. Yeah, we're original. I jumped out at one point but my hands got really cold so I didn't stay in for long. I did jump off a rock into the river though. Oh yeah, we were on the Hudson, by the way.
We got back to the base camp, ate dinner, finished packing up our stuff and came back. It was a really fun weekend. There's another camping trip this weekend that Kristen and I are going on. Almost all of our friends want to come too, but I'm not really all that excited about it. It was kind of nice to spend some time with different people. Plus, this weekend no alcohol was allowed, but we're bringing some next weekend and I feel like it's just going to be the same old stuff we always do if everyone goes and drinks, it's just that we'll be outside instead of inside. We'll see though. My friends tend to say they'll do things and then back out before it actually happens. Sometimes that really annoys me, but this time I'm kind of hoping for it....