First Canoe Ride of 2013

Yep, May is almost over and I'm finally getting the canoe wet.  I bought this canoe loader to fit it on Gretchen's newer/smaller SUV and it worked & looked great.

At the last minute, and based on how nice our trip to the Chattahoochee River NRA HQ was yesterday, Gretchen and I decided to use the canoe launch there at the National Recreation Area.  We had the easiest launch ever and were enjoying the river almost immediately.  Since we were going to return to the same launch, we headed upstream as "we like to feel we can get out of trouble, quicker than we got into it".

We were greeted with smooth water, tree-lined banks, and long views with nobody in sight.

Well, there were some geese.

We also saw a couple of turtles.

We also had to navigate around some rocks.  The next couple of pictures show you the "tip of the iceburgs".  We fortunately navigated around all of them without a single bottom-out event.

The whole trip was just under two miles as you can see on the Google Map I charted.  It was really all we needed and we had this part of the river almost to ourselves.  I'm so looking forward to more river trips this summer.