Category Archives: Trips

So I went Whitewater Rafting last weekend. The day was basically split into two parts, divided by a lunch break. In the morning, we went through a long series of Class 2 rapids, basically short and choppy waves. It was mostly relaxing, until we started having waterfights with other boats in our group.
It turns out there there’s actually a small amount of tactics involved in waterfights between two rafts – positioning the raft can make it much easier to splash the other, and being trapped in between two enemy rafts is a pretty big problem. Of course, the fact that everyone was already wet meant that getting hit wasn’t really a problem.
The second half of the day was definitely the best part. We got to go on about four Class 3 rapids, and we all got completely soaked. There isn’t much that can compare with going down a rapid right into a huge wave of water.
Overall, I thought the trip was a nice escape from the monotony of life. The rest of the summer will probably be quite boring.

I got back from Northern Tier last Sunday. It turned out not to be as good as other people described – mostly the weather. I’m not sure how, but apparently we were followed by a huge storm system the whole time.

The trip overall was fun, and we got to see some really nice sights. We crossed the border on the first day into Ontario’s Quetico Superior provincial park, a place of mostly wilderness.

Highlights of our trip included paddling 23 miles in one day, seeing Native American Indian paintings on the rocks near Tuck River and using a huge rainfly as a “sail” for a bunch of canoes. I’ll be getting the pictures up later, if you want to see them.

We arrived at Minneapolis, MN yesterday via Northwest Airlines. The plane was, surprisingly, an A320 instead of the more standard Boeing plane, but this turned out to be a bad thing – there was no inflight entertainment at all.
Once we arrived, we took a free hotel shuttle over to the Mariott Fairfield hotel, unpacked, and went to the Mall of America (tm?).
After wandering around the mall for a bit, we got really bored and watched Public Enemy.
Public Enemy turned out to be a pretty bad movie, despite a decent premise. It ended up as “criminal rob bank, police fail, rob bank, police fail, rob bank, police fail, person betrays criminal, police finally win”. The end was highly anticlimatic.
Anyways, I’m not going to have internet for the next 6 days or so.

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For the past week, I’ve been with my Scout Troop on a 220 mile biking trip. We started the trip up north of San Francisco, then rode down to Monterey Bay. Overall, the ride was quite enjoyable. The scenery was very nice to look at, even if it was cold, and the biking wasn’t especially hard, just long.
For this trip, I happened to lead Crew 6, the last crew in the troop. This meant that I rarely exceeded 10 MPH, and averaged 5-6 MPH over the full seven days. However, on one day, I got to ride in Crew 1 for a half-hour, and hit a top speed of about 50 MPH, which was really fun.
Accident wise, we had very good luck. It might have been because Crew 6 moves too slowly to have a serious accident, but we didn’t get so much as a flat tire. The closest we got was when one of the scouts in Crew 6 (Dewey) managed to flip himself upside-down on the side of the road. Later, lifting his biking, I still don’t know how he did it. Dewey’s bike was the single smallest and heaviest bike on the whole trip.
Each day we biked a varying distance, ranging from as low as 17 miles on the sixth day to 58 miles on the 4th, we experienced all sorts of exhaustion. Of course, since this route was planned with younger scouts in mind, it was actually pretty easy (or maybe that’s just me).
I also got to meet a couple new people and talk with old friends. A lot of siblings came to X-Miler as one of their first campouts, so it was a good opportunity for socialization. In the end, I was in a little group including Brandon, Helen, Aaron, Laura, William, and I. Collectively, I think we had every single high school student except Brian Ip (because he’s weird like that). Topics of discussion ranged from biking to the new Venture Crew 453.
On that note, Brandon, Yifen, Adam, and Helen are starting a new Venture Crew for Troop 453. Anyone over the age of 14 and under the age of 21 can join, so if you like high adventure outdoors, please join! (not like any of you will…) Anyways, I’ll have the pictures later. Mr. Tung still needs to upload his 2000+ pictures off of his two DSLRs.

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