White-water Rafting!?

[Crap, I'm still not done with this!?]

To my amazement, M. had decided that she wanted to go white-water rafting. I mean, she's climbed volcanoes and hitchhiked through Patagonia, but she's really not much of an adrenaline junky. Oh, well, far be it from me to argue!

We found an interesting place in Bend that would take us on a short, cheap trip, and, fortified by a fine lunch and beer tasting at the Deschutes brewpub, we headed out. We got onto a bus nearly full to the brim with friendly folks from Sunriver (about which I can say more later), trucked down to the river, and headed out.

It was a very pleasant experience, gently paddling down the river with a guide and few of our new friends, floating past big volcanic flows that had obviously redirected the river, and bopping through a couple of class 3 rapids and on down and out. We both got thoroughly soaked, which was kind of the point of the exercise and had a pretty good time.

The guide was a pretty friendly guy, and really went out of his way to make it a pleasant experience for us, chatting us up about our trip and making everybody feel pretty comfortable. We were kind of abashed by the other folks in the raft, who'd been golfing and biking and doing all sorts of stuff in the morning, where we'd just been hauling ass and drinking and doing laundry. :-)

We finished off the day with yet more beer, at yet another brewery, and some exhausted sleep. All in all, the rafting was a pretty worthwhile activity, even if it was kind of pre-packaged.