On Friday, I leave for Girls Cabin Weekend '09! It's taking place here, in case you're wondering! (You want to join, don't you? I know you do.)

This year, we're kicking off the weekend with a day tubing on the Shenandoah River! We are so excited to get the party started off right. But, I don't think I can go to Cabin this year without mentioning the, ahem, interesting day we spent on the river last year. (Note: this story is told better by Jessie, in person, after a few drinks. I'm just sayin'. But I'm going to try my best to give you the idea.)

So, we were a little slow moving that morning. Okay, we were so slow moving that we missed our chance to actually go tubing. I have NO idea why. I mean, I know one of us was insistent on packing a cooler, with, um, sodas. (Yeah, that's what they were.) But surely, I don't understand why they wouldn't give us tubes. Or maybe they would have. I don't remember. Jess? I mean, didn't those punks that rode the same bus with us have tubes?

So, we had to settle for rafting. Could be fun, right? A relaxing ride down the river. I mean, it was just for three miles. No problem.

First, something has to be said about the bus ride to the river. Imagine the boat ride in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory except ten times faster. I'm convinced we were traveling at light speed. It was both amazing and scary at the same time. Now, onto the river:

We found out pretty quickly that we actually had to paddle. And some of us were better at paddling than others.

Mile 1: Fairly uneventful. We did; however, realize that we were VERY thankful for those "sodas". We also learned that paddling sucked, and we sucked at it.

Mile 2: This mile felt like it was approximately 5 miles long. I was sure we had already passed the mile marker, only to see the mile marker 5 minutes after I was sure we had passed it. We also took a break during mile 2 right before we headed down the "raging rapids". When I say raging, I mean, not so much. They lasted all of 10 second, and I clearly remember one of us saying (could have been me, I'm not sure), "That's it?" We were positive that there were more rapids somewhere. Nope. This was also the mile when we found ourselves just sitting still in the water. WTF? We're on a river!

Mile 3: We get to this mile and all is going a tad better. We're moving at a fairly decent rate, but is it a bad thing that I can touch the bottom of the river with my paddle? Yes. It is. Why? Because rafting on a river at the end of July when there hasn't been much rain = raft gets stuck. A LOT.

This was both the longest and worst mile of my life. I really kind of hated it. The first couple of times we got stuck, we laughed. After that, not so much. One time, I got out of the raft to try to help get it un-stuck, my foot slipped on a rock. All I remember seeing is the bottom of the raft smashing my face, being thrown back, and my knee smacking a rock like a hammer on a nail. Wow, that kinda hurt. I look up, and Jessie has fallen too, and the other girls are trying to help me back into the raft.

After that, we got stuck about a hundred times more. At one point, we could see the pickup point. Seriously could see it, and we would move about 5 feet then get stuck. I KNOW people were laughing at us. They had to be. I would have laughed at us.

When we got back to the cabin, I walked onto the deck to hang my towel to dry, and Jessie's mom asked, "How was the river?"

My reply, "It sucked."

But in the spirit of cabin, we laughed and laughed as we retold our story about a dozen times and soothed our aches and pains with the hot tub and Crown and Coke Zero. :o)