After we left Ouachita, we drove for nearly 2 hours before finding a place to set up camp.  I guess on Saturday of Labor Day weekend, you should already have a spot by 3:30 p.m.; we were thankful we could even find one at all!  We set up our camp and discovered that our packs weren’t as water-resistant as we had thought; our sleeping bags were wet from the downpour, and we hadn’t wrapped them in the trash bags I had brought.  Whoops.  I draped them on the car, where we left them for several hours.

The sheet we packed was wet, but not nearly as wet as the sleeping bags.  All three of us were zonked, so we went into the tent and lay on our sleeping mats with the sheet and read for an hour or so, until the neighbors arrived.

With three dogs.

Three dogs, one of which barked ALL THE TIME, another one barked most of the time, and fortunately the large German Shepherd was silent.

“Oh my gosh,” I moaned to Joey.  ”We’re never going to get any sleep!”

Fortunately, my prophecy wasn’t correct.  The dog did bark pretty much constantly until about 10:30 or 11:00, and this was annoying to us because we tried to go to bed about 8:00, due to our exhaustion from hiking 5 miles on a mountain.  Also, the dog’s owners were the kind of people who felt like when they were outside, they had to be YELLING because they were OUTSIDE and when you are OUTSIDE YOU HAVE TO YELL.

We didn’t fall asleep for a long, long time.

And then, in the morning?  The dogs started barking super early.  We managed to stay in our tent until 9:30 and doze, but we were still kind of bleary-eyed when we did finally try to sit up.

“Ohhhhhh,” we both wailed.  ”OW, we are SORE!”

It’s true; we were sore from both our backpacking, and sleeping on the ground. Henry?  Henry was still exhausted.

He wouldn’t leave the tent.

We left the fly unzipped, but he just stood in there looking at us even after we called him.  We could see him thinking NO WAY, I am not getting out there.  The sleeping bags are in here and I’m not leaving.

We did finally make him get out, and then he just sat outside the tent and whined to get back inside.  He was exhausted, out of his element, and probably a little sore like us too.  We just laughed at him.  Poor little guy was so tired he wouldn’t even walk around, so I had to pick him up and carry him over to the picnic table where we were making breakfast.

Oh – did I mention that I had hurt my knee the evening before?  I had.  And it really hurt still.  As we were sitting there eating our breakfast (egg and cheese omelet) we made the executive decision to rent a canoe and take a paddle down the river with Henry.  This way we could ascertain if he would like going to the B-dub (translation: Boundary Waters), because we already knew he’s like the portages.

By 11:00, we were on the waiting list for a canoe and sitting on the dock enjoying our books and the atmosphere.

It took nearly an hour, but soon we were on the river.  It was great; shallow in spots with some really exciting rapids.  We were had an Old Town canoe that was kind of like an elephant, I banged on the side a few times to ascertain whether or not we needed to avoid the rocks.  It was the thickest, heaviest canoe I had ever whacked on, and I was glad we weren’t in the B-W trying to maneuver it through a portage, I could just see someone throwing their back out.

Just to the left of the canoe in the picture was our campsite.  We had forgotten to pack sunblock, so we pulled over and Joey ran up to our tent and grabbed it, then we headed down to shoot the rapids.

Since I haven’t steered a canoe in a year or more, my skillz were a little rusty.  We nailed some rocks a little harder than I was happy about, but then I remembered we were in an Old Town that weighed about 95 lbs of solid kryptonite, so I stopped stressing.

We enjoyed the view SO MUCH, about every 10 minutes one of us said “Oh this is GREAT!” or “Isn’t this amazing?” or “Best Plan B we’ve ever had to make!”

Henry?  Loved the canoe.  After he realized it was WATER! on the other side of the kryptonite side, he tried to lean over and get at it, but he almost fell out.  So he stopped leaning so far.  We pulled over to give him a chance to get his paws wet.

He was happy as a clam standing on the rock, drinking the river, and getting his paws soggy.  We let him cool off for a few minutes, then loaded him back into the canoe and continued our putz down the river.

He stayed on the side of the canoe for a very, very long way.  Not only did he blaze the trail on Ouachita, he was going to blaze our canoe trail as well.

After the rapids, the river became calm and smooth, like glass.  And as we were in no hurry whatsoever, we did less paddling and more relaxing, talking, and laughing at Henry’s futile attempts to reach the water.

We stopped and beached the canoe where the river got very shallow.  Henry was getting warm again, and we knew he’d love to play in the shallow water.

We were right, of course.

And then, all too soon, it was over.  When we saw the end, we turned around and paddled upstream, back to the shallows we had beached at earlier.  Henry got back out of the canoe and waded around in the water, and we did the same until we started getting hungry, then we paddled back with Joey in the back steering.  We decided to power back in to the landing, and I gave Joey a quick lesson on steering a canoe at high speeds while we whizzed down the river.  He took to it quickly, and soon we were going in a straight line (bonus!).

It was now 1:30, so we made a late lunch and sat around camp like bumps on a log.

We were tired.

“Should we just pack up?” He asked.

“Sure,” I said.  ”I don’t know if I can handle that dog again tonight.”

And, so, we broke camp.

(We tried to make a fire here, but the wood was wet.  It was a very sad situation.)

While we worked, Henry sat on the picnic table and licked up things we may or may not have dropped while eating lunch.  He was so dirty and tired, and pretty much smelled like a moldy pair of socks.

By 3:30, we were on the road driving back to Dallas.  I cracked open my book, Julie & Julia, and had read ONE PAGE when Joey suddenly yelled, “OH!  An Armadillo!”

I almost got whiplash jerking my head around to see it.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yeah…right back there…” Joey said.

I wanted to beg him to turn around, but I refrained.

I think maybe I am not destined to see an Armadillo.  And I had such high hopes for my Armadillo-sighting chances this weekend, too.