My Apologies

I have to offer my apologies...I kind of left you all hangin about the final part of our river trip. It really is quite brief so I will share it now.

Well...if you have been keeping up (and you should be!) then you know we were on a trip to the Brazos River and on our first trip down to the water we found what we believed to be leeches in deem'dar waters! We were less than enthused about that thought as we prepared to canoe the river the next morning...well I was at least! We got up a little early, had eggs, sausage and cinnamon rolls for breakfast, made our sandwiches, packed the ice chests and were ready to head out when our ride got there around 9am. I wasn't sure how many miles we were going, but he had said the day before it would take 5 or 6 hours..so we didn't want to get too late of a start. The upside was that no one was booked in the cottage after us, so we got to leave our stuff there and go back and shower before we head home. Bonus!

We all piled in the van (with no A/C) and were chatting with the man while driving to the drop point. He asked if we swam any the night before. I told him the kids got in the water for awhile, but didn't stay long after they made their Animal Channel discovery of leeches. Now know, I totally and completely had an ulterior motive in mentioning this. I wanted to know if they really were leeches BEFORE I got back in the water. On the surface I was my normally calm, cool and collected self...inside - not so much! He kind of snickered and said..."Everyone always thinks that, but they really are just worms." He explained that they are kind of like the sucker fish you see in fish tanks that clean up the algae. They attach to the sides of the fish and eat "stuff" off of them. He made sure to point out they are harmless and do not break the skin. Hearing this did make me feel better, but in my mind to take me the rest of the way to ok with it, I reminded myself of all the super wealthy women who go to the super fancy and expensive day spas that have those spa treatments where they put their feet in tanks of fish and the fish eat the dead skin cells off of their feet. So, if you think of that, then this is just the redneck version of a spa treatment! Another bonus!

Here is a picture of the redneck spa treatment in action.

Even after filling my head with thoughts of really soft supple feet, I still cleaned them off every time we stopped to swim. (I will stick to my local nail salon for pedicures, but thanks anyways!)

The rest of the day was filled with beautiful scenes, family fun (like splashing each other with the paddles), Josh trying to learn to steer the canoe and not zigzag all the way down the river, swimming, rock skipping and a really great day. I am ready to do it all again.

Since it takes so long to up load pictures here, I am going to leave you with a link to the rest of the pictures..here

Oh and before I forget...I found the video I thought I had lost! I am not sure if it is just my computer or not, but the sound on the video is way ahead of where it should be (checked it...it has to do with windows media player on my computer I guess...it is fine on flickr). You can watch it..here