We had a beautiful day for the first kayaking trip of 2018 and I was all fired to quickly get the boats loaded up and to start the day.
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That's Roger and Kyle on the right and you'll notice that Kyle had to use the "yellow submarine" (aptly named as it likes to go underwater!) as we had a special guest with us on my Trio 11; David!! As you can see above, and in ALL of this trip's photos, the water looked like a bottle of Yoo-hoo which is because of all the rain we had this past week. The good news for The Etowah River is that it was up quit quite a bit and the good news for us is that for the first half of the trip we had a nice current pulling us towards Lake Allatoona.
The park had a nice pedestrian bridge connecting trails on both sides of the river and they made sure you knew what city you were in.!!
And yes... more Yoo-hoo as this is mostly what we saw on this relaxing trip down the river. Maybe it isn't beautiful to everyone, but to me it is magical.
As for wildlife, I only saw one turtle the whole day and we had a trio of birds of prey above us a one point and point – I was just too slow (or lazy!) to get me camera ready. There was some debate as to if they were hawks or buzzards. 
Either way, they were pretty soaring above us. We also run under a TON of purple martins and I was only able to snap off this photo. You will have to click on it to get the full-resolution to see anything.
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As with the picture above, you can click on the ones below to see the full-resolution images. These next two are my attempts to capture them in-flightit flying.
Since this was David's first outing with us, I'm "honoring" him with a couple of pictures in my (exciting) blog post! Thanks for coming out with us, David!!
As you can see in that last picture, the river gets got very wide (and still) as we approach approached the beginning of the Allatoona Lake. After about 3.5 hours for on this 10 mile trip we were past Knox Bridge.
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This is the same spot Gretchen and I visited recently as captured in when we were Powering Through the Lake Allatoona Section of the Etowah River and this . This trip marks the half-way point of traveling on this river as I have now done completed 8 of the 16 sections documented on the Etowah River Water Trail. I'm so looking forward to cover the second half, too!