zachary’s kayak life

January 18 2010.

We found this train museum  on our way to my dad’s cousin’s, we also saw a motel called the Red Caboose Motel where you could rent a caboose for a night and the restaurant was in an old dining car, neat right? Well the museum was even better!!! In it there were so many trains that it took us two hours just to look at them and another half hour in the model train fun zone. The fun zone was the best, there were five model train sets and a huge Lego city with working trains in it. You could even control and play with one of them, which I spent a lot of time doing . In the main hanger, there were trains of all sorts including freight trains, passenger trains, electric trains, old steam trains (including the first ever train in America), rail plows, trolleys and a rail bus which was called the Doodlebug .  They also had almost every type of train car that you could imagine and you could look in most of them, you could look in the trains too, and in one of them a guy who volunteered there gave us a tour of it, showing us the motor, how it worked, the controls and how to drive it. I was amazed at how little controls there were and how simple it all was, I had expected the cabin to be covered in controls, but no!! There were only a couple gauges and like 8 leavers. I also found out that it seems very easy to drive a train, but it’s also, in my opinion, excruciatingly boring, which I figured out while I was in a simulator. After that we went in the gift shop but did not buy anything .

It was definitely a place worth visiting and I would be glad to go back any time.

Zachary .

January 10 2010.

We went to visit friends (Stuart, Hua, Jessica and Steven) in Pennsylvania and with them we went to Washington to visit the Air and Space museum. It was amazing, there were so many displays. There was a section on the evolution of the plane, astronomy and space flight, they had the story of the Wright Brothers, of World War 1 and World War 2 in the air, there were sea planes, race planes, passenger planes, fighters, bombers, rockets, satellites and even part of a space station. My two favorite places were the engines and turbines and the flight simulators, they had turbines from a lot of different planes, and they  were real and open so that you could see the moving parts inside which made it easy to learn and see how they worked. The flight simulators? Those were incredible, they were two people, a gunner and a pilot, it was fun, your goal was to destroy at least 5 enemy fighters in 6 minutes, Stuart and I only got 4. But was it ever fun!! You could do flips and flip the whole thing upside down, which, by the way, is very disorienting. It took us 5 hours to go through the museum and by the end Jessica and Steven were done, so Stuart and Hua went back home. Then we went for a walk outside took a look at the other museums and went to see the National Monument. It was really windy, so we went back to the car and got a hot chocolate at StarBucks.

Now I am hoping that we will go back to visit another museum.

Zachary .

September 31s to October 12 2009.

#1. Lunch and dinner at our uncle Fred’s house with the Family.

#2. Playing a game of  jousting with Zane and Zack, taking turns being the horse. We had played this semi violent game the last time that we were there, which was 4 years ago.

#3. Going to the Texas state fair on Friday.

#4. Spending a whole day playing with Zane, Zack and Zecke .

#5. Watching Zack try, and failing, to eat a 3 and a 1/2 inch burger.

#6. Teaching Zane and Zack to kayak.

#7. Going to a party at one of there friend’s place, it was a lot of fun by the way.

#8. Mapping our trip through Arkansas with a book that we got at the welcome center.

#9. Stopping at some good restaurants.

#10. Stopping at more restaurants.

#11. Walking on a 126 foot sand dune next to lake Erie, and we ski jumped all the way to the bottom, on the permitted side of course .

#12. Sleeping at a lot of hotels.

#13. A very pretty drive between the 401 and Highway 17.

#14. Finally arriving on the Ottawa River.

#15. Getting back on the water after 6 days!!!

#16. Playing on one of my favorite wave, Corner Wave, with my favorite boat, my new star.

#17. Sleeping in my own bed after a month of traveling.

#18. We’re back from Valleyfield,  it’s October 12 2009, and therefore marking the end of our Vacation.

“WARNING” These lights that you are about to read are not HIGHlights. If not willing do not read.

#1. Saying goodbye to our cousins and crossing the Texas state line.

#2. Having it rain for almost the whole drive.

#3. Too-many tole roads.

#4. Too-much traffic in Toronto.

#5. Leaving the Ottawa River 2 days early because of snow.

I hope that you have enjoyed my Vacation To Texas saga.

Zachary:).

October 2 2009.

Our cousins, Zane, Zack and Zecke, came home early that afternoon so that we could all go to the State Fair together . After we got there and paid to get in, we bought 100 tickets which were only 50 cents each, not to expensive, I thought, at our local fair they are $1 each, but, I was soon proved wrong! At our fair the rides were 3-4 tickets and you paid for goods and games with change, but in Texas it was 10-15 tickets per ride and 25-50 for one ride which was a 200 foot swing !! . You also had to buy a game card to play games. So anyway, the first thing we did was go see the bird show which was really good and when you donated money, you gave it to a falcon and it would put it in a pot. Then we went to eat, I had a really good souvlaki pita with tzaziki   and a Dr-Pepper, yum. It was now ride time and the first one was a log ride were you went down small rapids and a big slide, we all got wet, but at least it was warm. We then went down this huge slide on a crazy carpet, then we looked at a couple people do the big swing, my dad tried to convince me and my mom to do it, but there was no way that I was going to do that and my mom was of the same opinion. So we went on a roller coaster instead, it was fun. Same with this hand gliding ride which I did with Emily and Zane. We played one game were you had to climb across  a horizontal rope ladder, I failed at that miserably . The last ride that I did was definitely the best and it was one that at the beginning I thought was crazy, like literally crazy!! The car show was immense, there was almost every manufacturer and you could sit in every one of them . We must have been there for at least 2 to 3 hours because we left when it closed. It was the best fair that I had ever been to, not to mention the biggest!

Zachary:).

September 28 to 30 2009.

#1, Lots of restaurants, some good and some not so good, but it’s still an experience.

#2, An interesting tour of an old cotton plantation.

#3, An insanely buggy walk, I swear the mosquitoes were like the size of an eraser at the end of a pencil.

#4, We ate at a really good restaurant that was next to an alligator infested lake but we did not see any alligators.

#5, Having our turbo fail in the middle of Dallas traffic and having to fix it in a parking lot.

#and finally, A warm and welcoming supper at our cousins’ amazing house and going to bed on a real bed .

Zachary .

September 24 to 29 2009.

Day #11. Finally, The level is good, and it is not raining, it was a good day to be on the water and so we were. The only hard thing was that the water wasn’t so low and grumpy’s was no longer friendly and Emily had just paddled right into it . She got her first ever major pounding and swam, not a very good start to the day! My dad and mom got her and Cheryl and I went looking for the Boat and paddle. We found the boat no problem and brought it to shore and emptied it. We still had to bring it across the river and Cheryl didn’t have her tow rope, so we tied the 2 boats together, but then we thought, this is dumb, we’re going to go down a river we didn’t even know, tied up to a second boat with out being capable of releasing it. We then gave up, marked the spot and were about to leave when my dad showed up, he had a tow rope so he towed the boat. when we got to the other side we brought the boat up to my mom and Emily who were waiting with the car before continuing down the river, did I mention that it was not a very good start to the day. A good thing was that we found the paddle and even better Emily got back in at Hell Hole, which as I described in my previous post, was awesome. We then went up to the park, I ran it 3 times. It is not a very good freestyle park, but it was a very good run.

Day #12. Today was leaving day, and packing, a 2 days drive lay ahead, the final leg of our journey before going back home.

Zachary:).

September 24 to 29 2009.

Day #10. Luckily it wasn’t raining so we got ready for the Hiwassee. It was a very pretty drive to a very pretty river, which turned out to be at flood level kind of like every other river in that area. It also turned the river into a 3h run, instead of a 6h run. The rapids were fun with lots of small waves, the ledge was nice and deep, there was a good boof which we walked back up a couple of times to run and a fun shallow, and I mean shallow, Hole. Emily then involuntarily  found an awesome eddy line with some big whirlpools on it . The lunch stop holes were fun and I managed to link some ends . then we paddled around a fresh water stream before continuing to the take out. Before going back to the camp site, We stopped at Hell Hole for a short session, it was amazing, really bouncy and super easy to throw any move that you could imagine  , then we went back to the camp site. My favorite part of the river t had been the scenery, but my favorite part of the day had definitely been Hell Hole.

Zachary:).

To be continued.

September 24 to 29 2009.

Day #9. It’s late afternoon and we’re at the Ocoee Whitewater Center, watching the water rise at least a foot a minute. our plan had been to do the Hiwassee but we had canceled the run and moved it to the next day, so here’s what happened since my last blog. We woke up to a cloudy morning, so we figured we’d go to town and do our laundry, because if it rained we would do the Hiwassee the next day. We were right in one way but wrong in another, it didn’t just rain, it POURED! I was now thinking, as we watched puddles turn into small ponds and ditches turn into streams, that it was a very good thing that we hadn’t gone paddling. We went to the Ocoee Dam Restaurant for lunch and it was really good. The rain hadn’t stopped but it had gotten windy, we tried to wait it out but it didn’t work, so my dad sacrificed himself and went to get the car, but even then, after the ten running steps to the car we were all soaked. As we started to go back to the camp site it stopped raining, so we decided to go and see if the park (Ocoee Whitewater Center) was in and it was but the flood warning lights were flashing, so we went and walked around and an employee from the center told us that the dams were releasing and to stay out of the flood zone, pretty sensible idea, don’t you think? So we went back to the car and waited. Finally the sirens sounded and the water started to rise. Like I said in the beginning, the water was going up at least a foot a minute and continued for a couple hours. The water covered everything, it transformed walkways into long windy slides, rock piles into big holes or waves, boofable ledges into immense  retentive  holes and small waves became huge or just simply washed out, it was cool, scary and impressive all at the same time. When we got back to the camp site we couldn’t find the keys, but luckily we found them in my dad’s coat hood .

It had been a crazy day and I hoped that we would be able to paddle the next day and not have to run around in the rain rescuing tents, which we did. Our site had flooded while we were gone and we had to throw away my tent .

Zachary:).

To be continued.

September 24 to 29 2009.

Day #7, continued. The drive to the Smokies was kind of uneventful except for the cool lizard and the huge dam we went over. We stopped at a camp site next to the Ocoee, set up, made a fire and cooked steak on it, yum yum .

Day #8. Today we were planing on running the lower Ocoee, the water level was low, but it still looked good and it was. The put in was easy and the first rapid (Grumpy’s) Had a great boof and we soon found out that a lot of the other rapids did too. After a lot of fun technical creek lines we got to the first really shallow rapid which would have aced the name butt scratcher. The second butt scratcher wasn’t as butt scratchy as it had looked from the road, there were some good boofs on one side of the river which were fun. We then stopped for lunch, the rest of the river composed of some really good narrow  wave trains and some good catch on the run play spots. The take out wasn’t as easy as the put in, it was a fairly steep hill to the car, but we made it. We ended the day with a camp fire and a bug hunt , we found some pretty significant bugs to.

We had all enjoyed our day , even Emily who, at the beginning of the day, had said that it was to technical.

Zachary:).

To be continued.

September 22 to 24 2009.

Day #5. On our way to Rock Island we stopped at the New River Gorge tourist place and walked to the lookout. It was pretty impressive looking down at the river and at North America’s highest bridge which crossed the canyon that they called The Grand Canyon of The East, we even drove under 2 mountains in Virginia, which was pretty cool. I was late when we got to the Rock Island State Park, so we had to eat in the dark, it was kinda funny .

Day #6. We started the day with a nice walk, we saw a frog, 2 turtles and even a vulture up close and they are UGLY. We then went for a bike ride to the river, it was fun, all down hill, but when we were at the bottom we all realized that we now had to go back up, and that was not going to be fun . We also found out, to our great dismay that there had been a helicopter crash which had taken out a couple power lines and because of that T.V.A. had shut down the water and closed all access to the gorge. After lunch we went to the Jackson plant to get a tour from Eric Jackson (the owner of the company), it was really good. Thanks Eric! On our way out we were told that there was a release at 6:00pm and that they had been allowed in which was good news, So at six we were parked, ready and getting in the water. The level wasn’t the best so the top wave was impossible to catch, the hole was nice but we couldn’t stay long because it was getting dark, so we continued to the camp sit. It was crazy doing the only other rapid in the dark and when we got out we still had a kilometer walk up hill , but we made it. It had been a tiring day, but definitely a good one.

Day #7. The first thing we did after breakfast was go find out if the helicopter was still down so that we could plan our day accordingly, because if it was still down we were not going to go back because no one was now allowed near the gorge. Turns out it was still down , so we packed up and left for the Smokies.

Zachary:).