Our Grand Canyon Whitewater Rafting Adventure! ~ Day 1

We arrived in Las Vegas on Thursday the 7^th of September, spent the night at a Marriott, had to get up at 3:15am (yes, you read that right: AM!) and be ready to grab the van (after a quick breakfast) at 4:45am. It was early! We were two of about 13 people who stayed at the Marriott the night before – we were all the people who flew in for the trip – everyone else drove to Marble Canyon, AZ and we met up with them there. So at 4:45am, we got in the van that took us to the Boulder City Airport.

Here’s a picture of all of us inside the plane. 

It was about an hour and fifteen minute flight (and not the smoothest, especially the last 5 minutes!) where we flew over Hoover Dam (which was cool having biked to it and boated to it on two separate occasions)

Just a cool propeller photo

A pic of the plane. Might be one of the smallest we have ever been on.

We then loaded our bags onto a trailer for yet another mode of transportation that day: shuttle van.

Finally, we made it to the rafts. Here they are!  Those bags are the dry bags we used to place all our stuff so that they stayed drive though all the rapids (and rain).

After loading everyone’s stuff using a fire-line (this is how we got everything off the boats in the afternoon and back on the next morning),

And making sure everything is doubly-sealed under even more tarps

We were ready to get on-board and start our journey of rafting 188 miles of the Colorado River thought the Grand Canyon!  This is the last picture of us clean and dry for a week:

This is Stephen, the trip leader and the driver of our boat. This is also the last time you’ll see him clean & dry as well! (The stuffed bear is named Hank.)

And we’re off! Lots of photos, so enjoy!

Our first rapid! (We thought this was huge until we hit some 7s, 8s, 9s, and 10s later in the week!)

Time for lunch!

And look who’s first to eat!

(Lunch today was a curry chicken salad, fresh fruit, chips & cookies ~ yum!)

And then we were off again………..

That’s Brad on the left as we go through a small rapid.

Splash from the rapid.

This was the other boat in our group.  We assume that this is what we looked like as we floated along the river.

Eventually we pulled into our camp for the night at 19 ½ mile camp. It was hot and a bit rainy, so we slept in the tent with the rainfly. Our camp, night 1:

Not bad views, that’s for sure!

Dinner was an appetizer of mozzarella, fresh tomato, and fresh basil with a balsamic vinaigrette reduction, barbecue chicken, strawberry salad, potato salad and corn bread, and brownies for dessert!

Onto Day 2!!