WOAH! How's that marshmallow?

Now, THAT'S a FIRE!

I'm a BIG scary Man

Camphenge...

Chris just hanging

Almost time to go rafting...

This is a pretty cool view of what's going on

Probably after Dan (shown here laughing) dumped another 3 people out...

This really isn't as tragic as it might appear...just "surfing" the rapid.

Nicole going down the slide...

This campfire is a little more pedestrian than last night's

...but there's nothing else going on...

We're all pretty tired from the rafting that this seems like a lot of fun.

Beth making pretty for the camera

The Republic of Margaritaville

Short and Sweet Recap. We camped at Pray's Big Eddy Campground in Millinocket, ME, not far from the Canadian Border. In fact, we were closer to Canada than we were to home in Massachusetts. In case you're interested, we were in campsite 7E.

There were several other folks who had come along on the trip Dan had arranged, but we didn't really know them so the group of folks - about 8 of us - that we did know camped together, and rafted together. We had our laid back group while the rest of the bunch were...well, a little more "hearty" than we.

On Sunday we gathered ourselves and headed out to meet our guide - a wonderful young lady from Cumberland ME named Erin. She taught us about something called "Bug Kites," that no one in our group had ever heard of. Apparently back in the day she and her friends would catch these literally bird-size flies and tie a small string around them, then hold on as they tried to fly away. Ewww. Those crazy Maine kids.

The river was running about 31CFS - or 3100 cubic feet a second. We were told this is approximately equivalent to 3100 basketballs cascading over the river each second. The mental image of 3100 basketballs bouncing off one's head every second is a pretty good image - it was funny earlier in the day...until we actually "swam" a class II rapid. More on this later.

The Penobscot is controlled by releases from the paper company dam, so the river is pretty predicable for the most part.

Our raft capsized once, at the very first rapids. Dan went flying from his perch at the bow of the raft and wiped Jon, Dennis and Nicole out of the raft with him. We had no other involuntary "swimmers" after that.

After a long day of rafting, we headed back to camp. We actually went to bed early. Early to bed, early to rise. We got up about 6 AM and were on our way back to Massachusetts by 7:30 AM. A six-hour+ drive home (about 375 miles) got us home in tired shape.

We slept for part of the day, then picked up our stuff. The worst part of camping is the actual clean up - washing the day old dirty dishes, etc.

We're really looking forward to getting our rafting pictures. The Zanettiland gang brought along a couple of waterproof disposables - we, only one. They both sat on the other side of the raft too, so together we should have some dynamite stuff to show off.

The last snap I took was of the raft. The river guide let us get out if we wanted and swim down a Class II rapid. No sooner had I grabbed the picture of the raft, I got sucked under and headed down river. Anyone whose ridden down a rapid on his/her back or been thrown out of a whitewater raft knows what I'm talking about here - it was wild, not knowing when to take a breath. Knowing that the liklihood of something truly bad happening was remote helped keep my mind focused, but by the time I got back to the raft, my sinus cavity was filled with water and I had a slight headache from it. Somewhat unpleasant, but not something I wouldn't do again. Dennis on the other hand jumped out of the raft, mashed his shin on some rocks and had his sandle torn off his foot into shreads. Hmm.

The whole experience was excellent. Michele has been talking about whitewater rafting for as long as I've known her. Now I know why.

For whatever reason, the last 5 pictures on our 27 picture disposable didn't come out. We're quite sure they would have been far more dramatic than the ones that did come out...okay, maybe not but we really don't know what happened to the remaining five. There were some other pictures that I know weren't intentionally taken, so between the ones that didn't come out and the mistakes, there was certainly a disturbingly few number of good pictures from the raft trip. And considering I was being called "Ansel" all day, I would have liked to have a bunch of really killer snaps to show off