A Wild Day In Whitewater...

On Saturday the alarm went off at 6am and I grudgingly left the cosy confines of the bed to get the ball rolling, as we had to be outside the hotel and on the road by 8am. Breakfast was amazing with a huge buffet selection for us to chose from. It would be a long time and several hours of rafting before we would stop for lunch. 

At 8am we left the hotel and drove to the rafting centre in a great deal of early morning fog that blanketed the hills. The journey took around forty-five minutes with occasional glimpses of the Potomac River that we would be riding later in the day. 

Arriving at the centre, we had a brief talk and filled out another form, then we collected our life jackets and helmets and boarded a school bus that would take us to the launch point for the rafts. There, we had a brief talk about how to sit and paddle the rafts, as well as any hand signals used by the instructors to help guide us through some of the larger rapids of the day. As the only person in our five-man raft with any kind of experience on a raft, which I admit wasn't much, I was chosen to be the captain and rudder for the raft. This meant I had the special job of sitting high and unsteadily on the back of the raft with only a small pocketed on the floor to put a foot in. 

After a first slightly disastrous rapid, we were soon in the flow and once I had got the hang of steering and viewing submerged rocks from my vantage point, we were rowing as a well-oiled team. Overall, the day was a success with only Sam and Lenka falling from the raft in a couple bigger rapids, and not flipping the raft - admittedly we came extremely close to doing so, which caused me to throw myself heroically to the across the raft. Unlike most captains, I was not prepared to go down with the ship. We stopped after a few hours for a quick lunch and then paddled for a few more before we reached the exit point, where we loaded up the rafts and took the bus back to the centre. Throughout the day, one of the instructors had been videoing our progress and once we had changed, we took the opportunity to see how we had done. 


We arrived back at the resort after dinner at Ruby Tuesday at about 6pm. There, we had welcome showers and chilled out for the evening, going down to the dining hall to settle a craving for desert, before turning in, hoping that we had staved off sunburn and sore limbs.