M. Skrillz |
Greetings everyone! I hope you all are recovering well from a wonderful Fourth of July weekend. I know a lot of people were doing all sorts of different things to enjoy their day off (unless you had to work) and to celebrate Independence Day. I myself had the opportunity to experience white water rafting with some friends, for the first time. A friend of a friend who works out at The Ohiopyle State Park invited us to come and being the adventurer that I am, of course I accepted the invitation. Now I've heard stories from co workers and friends who have done white water rafting before and most of them mentioned injuries so I knew it would be intense. So a group of us headed to there early, Thursday morning.
When we got there, one of the guys who I came with warned me to listen to our instructor (who was my buddy that invited us) it was going to get real! He told me that the first time he went, he thought it would be a sweet boat ride until he ended up flying in the air after bumping a rock. That woke him right up! So I made sure I paid careful attention to my buddy's directions and I'm glad I did. Once we're in our rafts and on the water, we practiced paddling under our instructor's orders. As soon as we began the actual course, it was on! Amongst the paddling, fighting the currents, avoiding bone-crushing rocks, and trying to not fall out the raft, we got what we bargained for. We hit a series of different rapids that definitely wore us out, including one called the Double Hydrolic.
On this particular rapid, our instructor and myself were not so lucky. We hit a huge rock which also dropped really low. Our instructor and myself were sitting in the back of the raft so when the end flew up, so did we. All I remember was hitting the water then spinning around like a piece of clothing inside of a dry cleaner on tumble dry. When I finally surfaced and got to smoother water, I saw my instructor, who helped pull me in onto a boulder. Somehow, the other guys on the raft stayed on and made their way towards us. The rest of the ride was pretty extreme but we manged to make it through. Afterward, we headed down to the natural water slide, located in the park. That was pretty cool. I also got to snap a couple pics with my DNA snapback and wristband in full effect.