West Virginia Whitewater

Dan, Me, Steve Meilstrup, Tim Turpin, and Michelle Chon in front of the New River Gorge Bridge

This weekend I went on the outing I'd been looking forward to all summer. Shortly after I moved to the area, a girl in the ward found an offer through one of those online deal sites for 2 nights of camping and 1 day of river rafting. Dan and I, along with Michelle, each bought one and planned our trip for mid-August. Two of Dan's roommates, Steve and Tim, decided to go in the end as well, so we had a nice group of 5 for the excursion.

We all took work off early on Friday and headed out. It was about a 5 hour drive to the campsite. It was a really beautiful drive. I couldn't help singing a little John Denver. The green hills of the east never seem to lose their magic for me. The landscape is so different from what I grew up seeing on car trips and I can't get enough of it! After setting up camp, we realized we really didn't plan much and so no one brought anything to do a fire, so we went up to the lodge and ended up watching most of Back to the Future II on tv. Yea, rough camping trip, huh?

The New River Gorge where we rafted

Saturday morning we were up early (partly because the group was so hard it was nearly impossible to sleep!),
had a quick breakfast and then headed out for the river! The guides were great. They were so a lot of fun, but also really knew their stuff. We were rafting the New River. Its supposed to be some of the best rafting in the east. It was fun, but it wasn't quite as exciting as the trip we did on the Payette River several years ago. But then again, how can you compete with Idaho?! Even still, there were some fun rapids and our guide let us get out and swim a lot along the way.

A great name for a restaurant, right?! We couldn't resist going, and they even had a drive thru window. We felt silly taking this picture, until another car pulled up and snapped a couple photos too!

The second night camping we were all pretty tired. That meant I probably got about 3 good hours of sleep, but the ground was so hard, I still found myself just waiting for it to be 6:30 so the alarm would go off so we could pack up and drive home. I will NOT go camping again without a mattress pad!! Even so, the trip was great--a fun adventure with fun friends!