July 22, 2006

July 22, 2006

Last night we figured out how to get the alarm to work loudly on my Palm Pilot. This will be the first time we will need an alarm to wake us up. We have a pickup scheduled for 9:15am and Aimee needs her coffee time.

The van picks us up at the camp office and we head to Sands main office a few miles out of Jackson, WY. After signing all our legal rights away, a school bus picks us up at 10:00am and heads 30 minutes south of town. We follow the Snake River the whole way. We are scheduled to take a white water trip down the Snake River canyon in a 14-man rubber raft. Aimee is very nervous as she recently heard a horror story about white water rafting from a girlfriend. At the launch ramp, we don life preservers and get a safety spiel about what to do if we get bounced out. We then get seat assignments. I am one of the portside oarsmen and Aimee gets a middle seat with lots of handholds. She is happy. The trip is nice with some rapids and cold-water drenchings but neither one of us was particularly afraid at any point. The flows during the summer are much less than during the spring runoff. The water is very cold though. To cool off, at one point I stick both feet in for about a minute. They are somewhat numb when I take them out. If we were to have been tossed, hypothermia would have quickly overcome our thin frames. We both decide this was a good first introduction for us to real white water rafting.

On the way back some fellow passengers tell us about the rodeo that is held every Wednesday and Saturday in Jackson. That sounds like fun so we make plans to go tonight. Since we don’t have a second vehicle we unhook the RV after dinner and drive into town and locate the fairgrounds. Rodeo is big in Wyoming. They have one channel here that seems to be devoted to rodeo. The warm up for the rodeo is a bunch of the local guys and gals exhibiting their riding skills. They must get lots of practice. The rest of the evening is devoted to bull riding, ladies barrel racing, bucking bronco riding, and calf roping. It was very entertaining. Aimee liked it the most. She was glued to my binoculars through the whole show. If I didn’t know better I think she was staring at the cowboys in their tight Wrangler Jeans. It is after dark when we return and I rehook the RV with a flashlight.