The Niobrara/ Day 41

I was supposed to wake up around 7am today to finish getting everything ready for our trip down the Niobrara today. However, Jonny was the only one to get up at 7am today. He woke me up, but I reasoned with myself that sleeping longer would be okay-- I was half asleep.

I woke up to Greg bursting through the door saying "Wake up!". That pretty much snapped me back to reality, and I immediately knew I had to get moving. I was about an hour behind "schedule", so I still had a lot to do in a very short amount of time.

Stumbling out the door, I had to get over to NAPA to check on the price of some valve stem adapters. When I got there, I found out that they were way over priced, so I did some running around Mission to try to find a better deal. Either the places I checked were closed or didn't carry what I was looking for, so I ended up giving in to NAPA's demands, then I was off to Greg's.

When I got to Greg's we spent quite a while filling up the last couple tubes, patching and reinforcing the holes we could find, and trying to figure out how to get everything down to Nebraska. I had to make a lot of phone calls trying to coordinate everybody's efforts, and Greg and I ended up sitting around for a while waiting for everybody to make it back to his house with the equipment/ vehicles we needed.

We shot a couple rounds of .22 while we were waiting, then they finally showed up! Jonny brought the Habitat truck and the cooler, so we could fill up on water and load most of the tubes into one truck. It took us a while to fit all of the tubes into the habitat truck, and we never actually got them all to fit, so a couple were stuck in my car, and we were on our way!

Once we got into town, we still had to pick up the girls, so we made a couple stops here and there. We filled up with water at the intern house, then we all caravaned down to Valentine. Most of our trip was pretty uneventful, but about 10mi out of Valentine we did have an incident.

Highway 83 has a speed limit of 65, but we weren't really sure how fast we should go with our truck loaded up with tubes. As we were approaching the state boarder, I started to notice that some of the tubes seemed to have moved themselves into a rather precarious position in the truck bed. Just as I started to notice that something was wrong, one of the tubes flew out of the back of the truck straight for our vehicles! I swerved and missed both of the tubes, but they hit Laura's car. No damage, but it was a pretty crazy ride.

We all pulled off to the side of the road to retie the tubes onto the truck bed, and we ended up making it in to Nebraska without another "incident". When we got to Valentine, we stopped at McDonalds, because some of us hadn't eaten yet, so we grabbed some food quick then we made our way out to Berry Bride to start our adventure!

Days of planning had come down to these last few moments before we officially got into the river, and it turned out that our plans were pretty accurately thought out! Everything went really smoothly! We strapped about 10 tubes together and we put an inflatable raft in the middle of our circle to carry the shoes, cooler, shirts, etc. then we rode the river for about 2hrs talking, joking around, laughing, and just having a good time! It was definitely one of the highlights of our weekend! 


After we got off the river, we all went to Pizza Hut for dinner, which was fantastic! Then we headed back to Mission to call it a night. Brooke fell asleep pretty early, while Sean, Daniel, Jonny, and I talked into the early hours of the morning, just like we did back in MN. 


That's about it. Thank you so much for your support!

In Him,
Brenden


Things I learned today:
1. Tubing down the Niobrara is so much sweeter when it doesn't cost $35.
2. I can trust the patch jobs Greg and I did on those inner tubes. We were both very skeptical.
3. It takes longer to cook a pizza without cheese than a pizza with cheese at the Pizza Hut in Valentine. Hmmm...