After our crazy first day, most everyone was asleep before 7:30. Waking up to birds singing, we enjoyed our breakfast of rice pudding with blueberries.
We then repacked everything differently. We had planned on things getting wet, but some of the dry bags did not seem to work as well as others. So we rearranged things needing to stay dry in the better sacks. It made packing more difficult, but we did not want to bother with trying to dry things out when we hit camp.
The river was wider and smoother, though there were still rapids. We took the obviously easy ones, but walked many of the rapids. We learned later that Andrea kept saying, “come on, we can do this one” on some of the harder ones.
The day was beautiful and we canoed past many turtles. There were a few snakes, but not nearly as many as the day before. We started seeing more birds, some we did not know the names of. Adrian had fun quizzing us on presidential trivia. Megan learned that it was fun to trail her fingers in the water. We sang often.
The other kids would often be heard singing also. They talked a lot! They learned that Audrey could paddle; but Andrea, being stronger and heavier, did a much better job. So Audrey ended up sitting in the “princess seat” for most of the remainder of the trip.
When we started looking for our campsite, we found a huge one on a rocky beach. We hung everything up to dry and pitched our tents. We taught the kids how to filter their drinking water.
We relaxed that evening. The kids played in the shallow waters and went exploring. We had rock skipping contests. We read Tom Sawyer out loud. Our day had been perfect!
Really sounds like a fun and interesting trip. But this old man will have to leave it to the young ones.