I had been trying to come up with something to do for my birthday and was looking into going rafting, but the only place I found that operates on week days was up past Sacramento so it would have been ~2 hours of driving each way and that didn’t sound like much fun.
There was another company–which I liked the looks of better anyways–that operates on the Stanislaus River. Only ~1.25 hours away, but they didn’t start their season until Father’s Day weekend. The weather was looking about as good as could be hoped for in June so we headed out to Knight’s Ferry for Father’s Day.
We grabbed sandwiches along the way to eat while we floated (the intention was for a calm, quiet, relaxing float down the river–which mostly worked out). The route starts with a short class-II rapid over which the company takes pictures. Unfortunately, we really hadn’t figured out what we were doing by that point so our performance was less than impressive.
We eventually got ourselves sorted out and got better about avoiding the rocks and trees (trees both in the water and hanging over from shore). And we found a calm section to eat our lunch.
There did end up being more strenuous exercise involved than I had originally envisioned. Turns out if you don’t keep working at it your raft mostly wants to get kicked into shore and get stuck on something. And if the river widens out and the water calms down then you end up not going anywhere unless you’re paddling. But we all survived and I was surprisingly less sore the next couple days than I feared. I guess my Ring Fit exercise is generally keeping my muscles in shape.
The trip was about 7 miles and we spent something like 3.5-4 hours on the water with a brief stop along the way to rest.