70°F and storms this morning, going up to 93° today. Going to be hot all week.
Got more grass mowed when I got home from work Friday evening, then finished with four hours in the pasture Saturday. I really can't let that go for two weeks, or the crab grass gets insane. We seem to be having a crab grass explosion this year.
Sunday saw us loading the kayaks and heading for water. This time, The Wife decided she wanted to get on a river somewhere in Missouri, as they seem to have some of the best rivers to paddle in the Midwest. We chose a section of the Big River near DeSoto MO, found a couple of boat ramps to put in and take out, and headed there Sunday morning. We arranged our own "shuttle" service by taking both cars. We parked mine at the take-out at Brown's Ford Park, then drove hers to the put-in at Mammoth Access. The river wasn't very high, but there was a good current. Lots of nice water to paddle, and more than a few riffles areas, some over debris, but mostly going around the bends. One of them has the distinction of ending my 54 years and 358 days streak of having never dumped a boat. The strong current was pushing me towards a large tree leaning out over the water, and instead of paddling through I decided to try to brake my speed. Bad move, as it pushed me right into it, and flipped me right off into the water. I'm not gonna lie; I used a fair amount of blue language, upset mostly that my luck had ended. Fortunately, all the tethers and waterproof stuff did what they are supposed to do, and when I righted the kayak everything was still attached except me and my insulated water bottle, which we caught up with hung up in some debris a little way downstream. We made it a little further down the river before it started clouding up and getting dark. The weather app on the iThingie had promised us no rain until after midnight. It lied, and the sound of approaching thunder and eventual flashes of lightning ended any debate about it. We pulled off at a small pebble beach, and stood under a sycamore tree for about an hour of what started as a severe thunder storm and eventually became just heavy rain. We were in a no signal area, so we had no idea how big it was or how long it would last. When the thunder seemed to be moving on and we saw no more lightning, we decided to start paddling again. Oddly, the map apps on our phones were working, so we could see that we were less than an hour of paddling from the take-out ramp. So, we emptied the rain water from our kayaks and paddled on in the rain, sometimes heavy, until we finally reached the destination park. There was a car sitting on the bridge over the river right next to the ramp, in which we imagined its inhabitants were watching us and wondering what on earth we were doing out there paddling in such weather.
Sore today. Not sure if it's because of slamming into a tree, or the fact that we chose a route that was 10.9 miles of sometimes challenging, unknown-to-us river ... or likely a combination of the two. My one regret is that I didn't take a few seconds to take a picture of the tree that dethroned me.
Busy day at work today, so I got a late start here.
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