It's a well known fact that you cannot have a camping adventure extravaganza without at least a little adventure -- the extravaganza's implied -- and in Big Bend it turns out you cannot have an adventure without a 10 lb bass jumping on your chest. It actually probably wasn't a bass -- my suspicions point to some sort of coked out gar -- but nevertheless a fish of some size sprung out of the water and viciously assaulted me. I am not sure whether this was its intention or not -- I'm still not 100% sure what happened exactly -- but whatever it was trying to do it successfully flopped around my side of the raft and onto my abdomen for a good 5 or 10 seconds before returning back to the murky depths from which it came leaving me with only a nice, superficial yet bloody abrasion on my right side. This story would be more odd than humorous were it not for the fact that this happened a total of three times during our two days on the river. A prior encounter led only to the fish briefly bouncing off the edge of the raft while a later incident resulted in the fish harpooning my right thigh leaving yet another, though smaller, superficial bloody abrasion. Aside from me being the victim the only other common denominator in all this is Sara being in front of me stroking away with her mighty oar. I am suspicious that she had a role in this somehow -- perhaps she's some sort of freaky Mexican fish whisperer. I don't know, I have a lot of suspicions. Whatever the conspiracy, I totally got taken by a fish. (Though in my defense he sucker punched me!)
That random adventure aside, our planned adventures did not quite work out quite as well. One of the alleged highlights of rafting through Santa Elena Canyon is going through the illustrious "Rockslide." "Class 4 due to its technical nature!" the old woman told us. Whatever crazy woman. I could have waded through that thing and I'm pretty sure a leisurely stroll through a series of rapids does not qualify for class 4 rapid status. This is not to say it all wasn't a bit hairy as we did get stuck, quite a bit, and we did start to take on water at one point as we were all busily debating whether or not the rapids we were in were in fact the dreaded Rockslide. I just feel that if something's gonna be a class 4 rapid someone better drown. They don't need to die or anything -- I'm not a monster -- but a little bit of water in the lungs isn't asking for much.
Lastly, sometimes in dry times, in dire straits, in long car rides, adventure must be improvised. And that's what the Livestock Game is for! Based loosely upon some simple ridiculous game from Josh's childhood, we together combined our huge medical student brains to form an improved -- dare I say awesome -- version great for all ages. Basically it's a straightforward points based game with the title of Livestock Game Grandmaster going to the one with the most points when the car finally stops. Unfortunately only two people (or teams) can play at a time as it's dependent on opposing sides of the road, but this limitation aside I think we have a winner. Here's how the points go:
- For each cow/steer you get 1 pt
- For each sheep you get .5 pts
- For each goat you lose 1 pt (see! the game teaches integrity!)
- For each horse you get 3 pts and you get to hit the other person (gently, hard, you decide!)
- For each donkey/mule/burro you increase your score by 50%
- For each dog you steal a point from the other player
- For each buffalo you get 2 pts and you get to smack the other person
- For each deer you get points from both sides of the road for 5 minutes
- For each buzzard/vulture resting on your side you get doubling points (i.e. 1 for 1 vulture seen alone, 2 for two vultures, 4 for three vultures, 8 for four vultures, etc.)
- For each wild animal alive and not otherwise mentioned (i.e. snake, fox, raccoon, etc) you get 20 pts.
- For each graveyard you lose 50% of your pts
- For each unicorn the other player has to be your slave for the rest of their life
And here's Annie's photos!: http://www.flickr.com/photos/annichani/sets/
And Paul's photo!: http://picasaweb.google.com/paulbgravel/BigBend2007
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