We carried our rafts down a set of stairs that was specifically designed for taking rafts down to the river. It's really wide and has rails going down the center for rafts to slide down as you walk down either side. At the bottom of the stairs, we again lifted the raft and ferried it to the water. Once there, Liz, our guide, asked for two paddlers to sit at the front of the raft. It would be up to those two paddlers to paddle in unison. This accomplishes two things; 1) it makes you look like you know what you're doing, 2) it makes maneuvering the raft possible. You see, if you're not paddling in unison, the raft will not go where you want when you want it to. It will more wiggle in place than move forward. I volunteered for the front, and so did Josh. It is up to everyone else, behind Josh and myself, to paddle at the same pace that we set - in unison.

Once in the water, we learned and practiced some of the skills we'd need throughout the trip. Liz would call out, "All Forward", "All Back", "Left Back", or "Right Back" and we would have to paddle accordingly. We did.. okay. After a few minutes of practice, Liz realized that the rest of our trip's rafts had already started down-river and another outfit's rafts were between them and us. So, we high-tailed (haha) it to catch up. Looking at this map, we put in at about Cunard.

The lunch spread was awesome. They had lunch meats, seafood salad, pasta salad, broccoli & carrots, fruit, chips, cookies, dirt-pudding and ice-cold water. While we waited for them to set up lunch and after we were done eating, we either swam in the river, or sat along the river watching the other rafters come through and then paddle back and surf the rapid.

After lunch, we piled into the raft again. Again, we tried to surf Middle Keeney rapid. Again, we failed. There were several other opportunities to jump into the river and swim through some rapids. We all took advantage of those opportunities with the exception of Rhonda. I'm sure that Rhonda stayed in the raft at least one time because she was the only one remaining in the raft when Liz fell out. Yes. You read that right. Our guide fell out of the raft when we were all swimming through a rapid called Thread The Needle. At this rapid, the river is fairly wide and slow on the left half. On the right half, there are several big rocks that form a pool of sorts. On the far side of that pool, there are two large cracks between the rocks. If you swim over to the pool, you get sucked between these rocks at no extra charge. On the far side, the water is deep and calm-ish. I didn't see how it happened. I just recall seeing Liz in the water with me as I went through the cracks when I exited the pool. Then, I saw our raft float into the pool and wedge itself in front of the crack in the rocks.

Liz swam back up to the back side of Thread The Needle and attempted to climb up the wet, slippery rock so that she could resume her position as pilot of the raft. Unfortunately, she was having problems getting grip on the rock which was sloped at about 20 degrees. I swam back and offered my assistance. She refused. I offered to hold her paddle so that she could use both hands to climb. She refused. Eventually, she crested the peak of the sloped rock and made her way down into the raft. She and Rhonda then navigated the raft out of the pool and when they got to where I'd been treading water for the duration of the raft-rescue, I climbed aboard and together we paddled hard to catch up to the rest of the group. They were at least 1/4 mile ahead of us... maybe closer to half of a mile. During the aggressive paddling, we talked a little. That's when I discovered why she wouldn't hand me her paddle when she was having trouble the sloped rock. If a guide is caught without their paddle, they have to buy a beer for every other guide on that trip. The same is true if a guide falls out of their raft.

The last feature of note was jump rock. Though, this jump rock was not the jump-rock that I jumped off of when I went back in the early 90s. This jump-rock is considerably smaller. I promised to do a back-flip off of jump-rock when they asked if anyone would be doing anything fancy. I made this promise because I'd done it before and my back-flip skills are still rock solid.

This picture is from my first trip with NARR on the New River.

The bus ride back included ice cold beverages of the adult and soda varieties. I had a Coors. The girls had soda... I think. Bubbles was a bit worried about driving over the New River Gorge Bridge. We made sure she was sitting on the side closest to the center of the road rather than overlooking the river. It is quite a view.

When we got back to the resort area, Bubbles and Boo played in the pond. I don't recall what I did. Initially, I was going to play with them but I got yelled at for taking a kayak into the inflatable toy area so I went back to shore. Beyond that, I don't remember what I did. It started raining at around 5pm and they made everyone get out of the pond once they saw lightning. It didn't seem like it was going to rain for a long time, but it did. It rained for the remainder of Wednesday evening and most of the overnight hours.

We ate at the buffet that night. Even that wasn't without hassle, though. When we ate breakfast that morning, we checked to see that we had reservations for dinner that night. Unfortunately, our names were not on the list. The lady at breakfast had said that she would double check and see why we weren't on the list for dinner and that it might be a good idea for us to go up to the office and see if we could determine why we were omitted from that list. Oh yeah... that's what I did when the girls were swimming. I went up to the office and cleared up the reservation situation. It seems they had us listed for dinner on Thursday rather than Wednesday. That wouldn't have done us any good. We were well on our way home by dinner time on Thursday. The dinner buffet was better than the breakfast buffet, but it was still what you would expect from a buffet.

After dinner, we went back to the tent and played games for a bit. We tried to have a fire, but it was just raining too hard. It was an early to bed night - thankfully.