By the time I got back to Mom and Dad's place I had to decide: Pack or Sleep. I was still pissed off from having that damn dead snake waved at me every time I turned around for the last five hours.... so i decide to pack now. "I'll get plenty of time to sleep on the trip!" i think to myself. I manage to get most of my stuff into six smaller jugs. I then put those jugs in a water resistant giant gym bag kinda thing. What doesn't fit in the jugs I just stuffed in the bag. It is water resistant after all. It's not like any of that stuff is really going to get wet! I am an expert canoer... just haven't been in one since... hmm.... When was Beverly Hills Cop in the theater?
I get to bed around 2:45 a.m. I blink and it's 5:00. Damn. Didn't want to start off this tired. Too late now! It's here and we are off! Thankfully Dad talks me into throwing a couple extra long sleeve shirts and a hoodie in with me. He didn't really have to talk too much really. The phrase, "You do realize it's 34 degrees outside, right?" goes a long way towards convincing you to pack say, a ski mask, on your summer kick off canoe trip!
I just want to say right now: I had no idea what cold was, until this trip.
The Six finally are all in the same place at the same time. Since starting the planning, we hadn't all been together. If we weren't all in actual shock over how cold it was, we might have been a little choked up about the real start of this quest, No turning back now! We pose for a couple of pictures in our sweet River Quest '13 T-shirts, courtesy of Mary Ann, then we high five each other, load up and tear off!
We head North to Warren, PA. It keeps getting colder and colder. When we get to the approximate area of the boat launch it was actually snowing. I wish I was kidding. Snow.
I say approximate area because we... ummm.... never looked into where we would put the boats in the water. We assumed (wrongly!) there would be a big park kinda deal that we could back the trailer into the water. So we drove in circles around Warren looking for a park. We're all looking on maps and trying to get 4G on our phones to figure this out. I mean... we can see the river, It's right fricking there! The Original Questers didn't actually remember getting in the water! They kept saying things like "Margaret dropped us off." and "This was Bruce's town, he knew where to go." All we found was a hospital that had a helipad right at the water's edge that some people in hospital gowns, smoking cigarettes, said it would be ok to launch from. Even though they couldn't figure out why anybody would get into that water. It was snowing after all.
I think to myself "Silly hospital smokers! We're going canoeing... not swimming! Jeez!"
Or so I thought...
