Reflections of My Travel

What a long, long, long night! We arrived safely but certainly not easily. We got to the Atlanta airport last night right around 20:00, a decent interval for our 22:05 flight. I got a bit worried when it took forty-five minutes to get through the check-in but was relieved that our secret security point was completely empty so no holdup there. We got to the gate and the plane was showing on-time so we sat at the Chili’s right at our gate to get some dinner. While we were sitting eating, Randal got a call from his cousin (the one who lives in Taiwan). Turned out, he had just landed a few gates up from us. He stopped and chatted for a few minutes on his way to baggage claime. Small world sometimes, you know. At 22:03, the monitor was curiously still showing our flight as on-time when the guy came over the loud speaker to say that “the plane is here, we’re just not sure where it is or why it’s not at the gate yet”. Great. So it was about a little after 23:00 when we finally left Atlanta – one hour lost. Our plane was supposed to have a non-deplaning stopover in Vegas and then continue on to Sacramento. During flight, the pilot came on to say we were about an hour from Vegas where the plane would get put to bed for the night. Um… so we’re walking to Sacramento? We land, deplane, and walk way the heck to another terminal for the gate that our new flight is supposed to be leaving from. As we approach, we see many people lying down in the corridor. Not a good sign. We find out that the new flight is running two and a half hours behind for an estimated departure of 02:30. Not good since we were supposed to be arrived at Sacramento at 01:30 and ready to check into our airport hotel. We chose to join the throngs of people trying to get some sleep on the floors. We finally arrived in Sacramento just after 04:00 and waited around an hour for our luggage which never showed so we had to file a lost luggage claim before dragging our tired butts to the hotel all the way at the other terminal. We checked in just after 05:00, with the continental breakfast already underway. We managed to get a few hours of sleep before waking to make calls to try to get our luggage. The luggage arrived on a 10:30 plane and we were able to retrieve it around 11:00. Our ride, who was already waiting out front for us, was gracious enough to let us take a couple of quickie showers (the luggage lost had all of our toiletries). We then started heading towards Coloma where we were meeting up with the rest of our friend’s family at the campground. The rest of the day was pretty much spent relaxing and meeting people.

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After going to bed early to make up for Friday night’s sleep deprivation, we woke up bright and early this morning. And I do mean bright – what’s up with the sun coming up at 04:30 when it didn’t set until after 21:00? What is this, Alaska? We were up long before everyone else so we took a walk around the campground and went down to the river to see if the water was on yet. When we got back to camp, we had breakfast and got changed for our watery fun. I’m not sure what time the van left but it was a very interesting ride to the put-in place. There was music blaring (most of which we were unfamiliar with) and people singing and laughing and having great fun. When we got to the river, it took quite a while to blow up the rafts and prepare them for the water. Having never been rafting except on a commercial gig, I was a bit apprehensive, especially since I had presumptions about the rivers out west being much bigger and scarier. We got pretty much the same exact safety talk that we get with our commercial outfitters on the Ocoee, which was actually reassuring. It’s good to know that the private rafters cover the same safety points. The rafting was fun. The American River is very different than the Ocoee, much less intimidating with only 2 and 3 class rapids, but much fun was had. The water was apparently very high and fast. When we got to the take out point, a discussion commenced on whether to go for a second run but since the water was supposed to be turned off at 13:00, it was decided that one run was it for the day. Of course, we did notice that the water didn’t actually go down until closer to 18:00 so we could have easily gotten another run or two in, had we known. But then we would have missed a great deal of excitement. As we were sitting around talking at the campsite, we started to hear sirens and commented on how someone was hurt. A few minutes later, after hearing many more sirens, we noticed the large plume of smoke coming up from the adjacent mountain. We walked up the hill of the campground to see the blaze spreading down our side of the mountain, which was probably a quarter-mile from where we stood. We discussed evacuation plans, should it come to that, while taking pictures of videos of the conflagration. We watched as the observation plane circled the blaze, three helicopters dumped water, and three planes dropped chemical retardant. What a show! After it started to get contained and the campground owner updated us that there would probably not be evacuations for us, we walked down to the river to watch the helicopters dip water. Amazing stuff. Amazing videos. It made for quite the exciting day. We heard news that they had it fully contained but there are still several spots glowing up there tonight.

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We loaded up and went to the river this morning to find it empty. We waited a couple of hours for them to turn on the water but they never did. We did at least have some entertainment while we waited. There was another group that showed up with a brand new raft and we watched them run around not knowing what they were doing. We also had several from our own group taking part in a rock-skipping competition. When they got tired of that, they moved on to skeet shooting where one would throw up a big rock while everyone else tried to hit it with little rocks. My boy got the bragging rights in being the first to actually hit it. After a while, it went to skeet shooting with buckshot (instead of trying to hit it with one small rock, they started throwing handfuls of pebbles) to make it easier. Finally, a couple of guys regressed to their animalistic roots and started acting ape-like with the rocks. An amusing time was had by all. We left and headed to some orchard for fresh fruit pies and ice cream. That ended up being our lunch. Mmmboysenberrypieandicecream. When we made it back to the campground, we headed to the pool to cool off and take a nap. Mostly, it was a lazy day.