RAFTING IN THE GRAND CANYON
The far
more adventurous half of your favorite traveling duo is doing it again. The
true captain of Team VFH is off on a two week, 200+ mile white water rafting adventure
down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Ever since I first laid eyes
on her Match.com profile picture where she was holding a fish she caught in
Alaska sweetly smiling Janet has regaled me with tales of her hikes up Colorado
mountain tops and how she would wrestle alligators and grizzly bears at the
same time.
I’m no
couch potato. I’ve run 9 marathons. I have hiked overnights on trails on my own
and have taken week long canoe trips down the Delaware. But, the operative
words here are “canoe” and “Delaware”.
A
number of years ago we tried our hands at white water rafting. We took a day trip
on the Ohiopyle River while camping in Western Pennsylvania. I was assigned “captain”
of the raft and Janet and I were paired with three teenaged girls who did not
paddle. Rafting and canoeing are completely different and the intuitive nature
I have with a canoe simply doesn’t work with a raft. Yeah, we tipped over at
one point and I was kind of caught under the raft for a bit; it wasn’t fun and
I was finished with the whole raft experience. Janet though wanted to go out
the next day on a rougher stretch of the river.
That
did not happen. But, this trip did. It’s a “bucket list” item for her and it is
something she claims she has dreamed of doing for ages, although the first I
heard about this was about 18 months ago.
Conversely,
my “bucket list” item is to hire a boat and captain to sail us through Croatia’s
Dalmation Islands. She thinks this is a great idea too, but first she wants to
go on a hut-to-hut hiking adventure in New Zealand. I really just want another
glass of wine while admiring a sunset over Hvar and she wants to bathe in the
chilly waters of the Colorado and fend off rogue Maori warriors.
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| Janet's kind of traveling |
Do you
understand now the title of this article, Embryonic Journey?
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| This is my kind of traveling |
Anyway,
I wasn’t very keen on this Colorado River adventure so I begged off it. Janet
recently retired and so this was her reward for her long career as a teacher, but
this reward is costly and for me quite prohibitive. The trip itself is approximately
$6,000, which doesn’t include tips for the guides, airfare or hotels and
incidentals before and after the trip, but on an excursion like this the guides
do all the work and you just hang on for dear life. So between the experience
and the pampering it’s worth the money. It usually takes booking years in
advance to get on a trip like this, but Janet was quite fortunate to get a
place on this trip when a single opening became available a scant 18 months ago.
Two weeks ago, feeling guilty about not sharing this adventure with Janet, I
announced I wanted to go on the trip. The people at OARS, the outfitters for
this journey, laughed at me.
You know though the more I look at this trip the more I wish I had said yes a long time ago. Janet is going to have a lot of fun. She always seems to do things right. She is the captain after all. I can't wait to fight off those crazy Maoris in NZ.
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