Mushy Arms

Thursday, August 30, 2007
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Fort Mandin was our first stop today. Louis and Clark built it for shelter during the winter of the expedition. This was just a remake of the original fort, the shelter had apparently burned down a year after they lived there. There was nothing particularly fascinating about the fort.
We did learn a lot about the expedition. There were some funny stories. For instance, one of the members of the expedition went hunting and didn’t return. Two other men went to search for him, and couldn’t find him. He was missing for 16 days! He thought he had to “catch up” with the expedition. Finally, after over two weeks of “catching up” he was out of water, food, and ammunition. He sat down by the river, hoping to hitch a ride with a trapping boat. Then the expedition comes floating down the river, they picked him up and they were on their way.
The previous day we had arranged to go canoeing on the Missouri River. We met the lady she gave us our canoes, she was planning to meet us “downriver” at a certain location four hours later. We head out onto the river, then we realized that we didn’t know which way was downriver. It was really hard to tell because the wind was blowing the water one way, and the current was going the opposite way. We eventually figured it out after around 20 minutes. It was not a good start.
We stopped at an island after a while and went swimming. We had brought the dogs with us and Lavern was freezing after she got out of the water. We switched around people, my dad, Darby, Muffin, and Tatum in one boat, and Katty, Lavern, my mom, and me in another.
I found out soon after we started that my mom did not know how to steer. We were going zigzag across the entire river, so I decided to try my hand at steering. It didn’t work. We probably paddled 3 extra miles because we weren’t going in a straight line. My dad eventually had to pull us over and give me a steering lesson. It went better after that.
We finally got to the meeting place 15 minutes late. We were just thankful to be there because we still weren’t positive if we were going upstream or downstream. Over all we had a blast. Our arms were mush.


SMILES!
~Morgan~

P.S. I don’t know what the heck is with you guys! Why don’t you comment? I’m really feeling not missed and not loved over here. ~M~