We need Summer!

Maren:
With all of this madness and lock down craziness we are all feeling a bit antsy.  We are very limited on the things we can do so plans are always tentative.  The state is gradually reopening as Coronavirus numbers lessen and we are hopeful for somewhat of a "normal" summer.
Daddy has been wanting to take us on a rafting trip down the John Day river for years now and thankfully we were able to go this year.  The river was closed until just before we left, so we were not quite sure it was going to happen until right before the trip.  Then, we got a stretch of really bad weather that almost resulted in us canceling too.  In the end, we all decided (or really the dads decided) that we were tough enough and went.  Ultimately we had a really good time despite having a few very cold, very windy, and very wet days.  In fact, the darn wind seemed to never stop which made it down right horrible at times but thankfully the good outweighed the bad.  Since the weather was really bad we did not get to do a lot of playing in the water but we made up for it with fishing time.  I even caught my very first mammoth cat fish!  Daddy filleted him out and we had an awesome catfish fry when we got home.  Overall we spent 5 days on the river, with one lay over day in the middle.  We had a great time with our friends and made some memories that will stick with us for a really long time. 


Maddox:
Our first adventure of the season was our raft trip down the John Day River.  Daddy has been talking about it for years and this year we made it happen.  The Chick family and The Oppelt family came along with us too which made it extra fun for everyone.  The drive there was pretty long and miserable and we landed at the launch site around 10:00 at night which left us setting up camp in the dark.  Once morning came we were on the river pretty quickly for our adventure.  The first day was raining and really cold and it wasn't long before we questioned if we had made the right decision.  Thankfully the rain let up in the afternoon and we found a nice camp full.  While we were setting up camp for the first night we found some really brutal ground cover cacti with horribly long spikes and mommy found a scorpion!  Yikes!  Thankfully no one stepped or fell on a cactus and no one was stung by a scorpion!  As sissy mentioned, the fishing was off the charts on this river.  Every time you had a line in the water you would catch a little bass!  We had lots of fun catching the fish and saved them all for fish tacos the last night of the trip. 
The weekend that we got home from the river trip was Fathers Day.  We were all pretty worn out from the trip so we didn't go anywhere special.  We stayed home and had a nice barbecue for Daddy and Nonno.  Mommy realized that we had never made home made ice cream so we did that too!  She found a new recipe and we cranked out some really amazing banana nut ice cream.  Yummy!