Oh fickle weekend of adventure and misadventure.
Thursday evening, early Friday morning.
Cat and dog decide they aren't in the mood for sleep, so I am woken at 2:30am, 4:00am and again at 5:00am after only getting to bed sometime after 1:00am. Crankiness ensues and cat and dog are banished from the room.
Friday mid-morning.
Lack of sleep causes the inevitable: sleeping in. Wake up half hour late, have to rush to get ready for work. Get to work on time, but still sleepy and more cranky. Client is bothersome and tries to push my buttons. Finish training, leave pesky client and go the hell home.
Friday afternoon.
Get membership to Mountain Equipment Co-Op and get some gear for the trip. Go to Sobeys and get groceries and foodstuffs and ice for cooler. Go to NSLC and get beer for said cooler. Get home and pack said things and other things and run around trying to finalize the organization of an overnight trip which seems needlessly complicated by my own lack of organization. Realize I'm half an hour late and start pulling hair out. Get call from friends saying they will be leaving late so the need to rush goes out the window. Sit down, eat, watch TV and veg out until they call to let me know they're an hour from the site.
Friday evening.
Friends call from New Glasgow, hop in car and boogey down the 102. Drive to Exit 10 and park the car. Meet up with a few interesting folks who are the other half of our camping contingent. Get the call that my two friends are lost on the highway to New Brunswick, the wrong direction for them to be. Settle the directions issue and split up with the folks currently at Exit 10: I'll guard the exit and wait for the lost folks, the rest will go ahead and secure the campsite. POS car decides to overheat just for my amusement. Friends arrive and we proceed to the campsite, setup tent and proceed with the beer and lawn libations.
Friday late night.
Enjoy the stars and fireflies and a wonderfully built campfire. Get all loaded up on Rickard's Red and eat an entire bag of honey nut Cheerio party mix. Ugh. Watch as seemingly normal city folk become lumberjacks. Sight the legendary sasquatch running with a giant club. Walk into the back wall of the invisible mystery hut while trying to find a good shrubbery to pee on. laugh my ass off at the antics of a bunch of drunk capers. Sleep in a tent 8 feet wide but only 28 inches off the ground. Zzzz.
Saturday morning.
Wake to a cold and grey morning, shivering, but with not even a slight sign of a hangover, proof that there is a god. Discover that it was cold enough to keep most of the ice in the cooler frozen and that my breakfast of sandwiches and apple juice is cool, crisp and tasty. Mmm. Get changed and prepared to go Tidal Bore Rafting at a place down the road from the campsite. See the sun come out and weather get nice as we gather at the lodge and prepare for our adventure. Learn flip-flops are not acceptible footwear (they fall off and pollute the river) so have to wear (yes, must have footwear), have to wear shoes off the used-by-eighteen-million-people-with-who-knows-what-gross-things-growing-on-feet rack. Shudder. Suck it up, put em on, say a swift prayer to the river gods and make a mental note to buy Javex on the way home to scour the bugs off feet.
Saturday mid-afternoon.
Hop on a zodiac and head out onto a calm and relaxing river, ride down towards the Bay of Fundy. Tidal bore arrives and engine in the boat decides to die. Boat operator smiles, apologizes and tries his best to get it going, but the look in his eye suggests he'd like to take a baseball bat to the outboard. We eventually drift and putter and finally get going fast enough to meet the rest of the boats up the river and find ourselves a new boat. Two hours of riding the rapids and getting soaked ensued. To finish up, a trip to the mudslide area for some slipping, sliding and plain ol' jumpin' in the mud fun. A quick swim to de-mud and back to the lodge for the BBQ and trip home. Scalded to the point I was red like a lobster and then summarily frozen in the shower to find out my clean (re: mud-free) shirt is back at the campsite.
Saturday evening.
Dried and re-clothed, head back to the city to let the dog poop and get a real shower and a real bed under my bottom. The car makes a really bad noise about 15 minutes from home and continues it until I turn it off in the driveway. Check the oil and it's lower than it's ever been, even though I had an oil change only two weeks ago. Learn never to trust Walmart to service the car. Clean up, re-de-mud myself, have beer and watch TV until the cows come home.
Oh what a tangled web we weave...
The whole weekend was shitloads of fun, but for every single thing that went right, it seemed something else went wrong. My poor nerves were frazzled from Thursday night on. The lusty part of the whole adventure was that some of the boat operators and a few of the passengers were pretty damn hot and decked out in wet swimwear or wet T-shirts. Yum. Our boat operator was a good looking young man in his mid twenties, in shape and fairly well toned. The entire trip down the river I was sitting right beside him and he had on a pair of very thin shorts over a pair of very thin undies, both of which were hanging down about two inches lower than they technically should have been. I was at eye level with the crack of his ass and it was like looking at a Monet. A perfect little V just showing a little bit of cheek and the sun was making the little hair patch there shine all golden (you know the one, it forms a little arrow pointing downwards *grin*). So I spent the entire trip a foot away from this and staring back and forth from scenery to sexy ass crack. Needless to say, my dreams that evening were not of the eagles that were flying overhead or the rapids or the mudslide or the BBQ steak. Life is good.
