Whitewater Adventure 2009 = success!

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I’m finally back and able to pay a little attention to my poor blog! As a heads up, this is a LONG (BUT TOTALLY WORTH IT) post with a TON of pictures!! If you have the patience to make it all the way through, I hope you’ll leave me a nice little comment!

Saturday:
woke up. ran to starbucks (of course) to pick up some vivanno‘s (If you have never had them, I suggest you go out and get one ASAP!). We left the house around 10:00 am. We had every intention of leaving at 9… yeah, that didn’t happen. We set the GPS, and off we went! Projected time = 4.5 hours. However, add three (yes, THREE) restroom stops (I can’t help it, I pee a lot), and we made it in about 5 hours. Not too shabby!

Our first stop was the Whipple Company Store. I have to say, that while I had done a great deal of planning for this trip, I wasn’t 100% sure what I was getting us into. BF and I are both big into museums and other nerdy stuff, so I figured, why not, right? Well we arrived and I looked at BF and said “if it sucks, I’m sorry.” It was in the middle of nowhere. Not just saying that, I mean, it literally was. We thought we were lost and I looked up and said… “Oh.”

It was incredible. We learned so much about coal mining and the history of West Virginia. The couple who run the store bought it 2 years ago. At the time it was a condemned building and it was going to be torn down. The couple couldn’t bear to see this happen so they bought the place and started renovating it with their own funds! Their plan is to have the store/museum operating as a non-profit organization in three years. The only problem is that they are no longer able to use their own money to restore the building. They are having a benefit this weekend and we were very sad that we will not be able to make it.

BF and I were very happy to have stopped by and to have met such wonderful people. I KNOW that we will be visiting again (and keeping in touch!).

After we left the WCS, we went to “check-in” at the adventure resort. We set up camp and headed to get some grub! The drive really exhausted us so we went to bed pretty early. It thunderstormed ALL night. Literally. All. Night. Kept us awake because the storms were so severe. Minimal flooding in the tent, but zero sleep due to the horrific weather.

Sunday:
We set an alarm to wake up rather early to get some breakfast before our whitewater trip departed, but I want to send a big, sarcastic, thank you to the chick with the annoying laugh that woke up at 5 (thunderstorms stopped at 4am) with talking. Thank you annoying chick.

Post-annoying girl, we dragged ourselves down to get some morning grub (knowing full well we would need it for the LONG rafting trip ahead). It was delish. We headed up to meet our guide, sign our paper work (aka-sign our lives away) and head out on a bus to the launch point.

I jumped off of a giant rock (known as Jump Off Rock — where they get these names, I just don’t know… 😛 ).