The Niangua

This past Sunday we headed to the Niangua River for our second annual canoe trip with some good friends of ours. We left Raegan with Grandpa and Grandma Seaba because we are not quite ready to take her on the river!

We had great weather! The water is spring-fed so it is FREEZING even when it is hot hot hot outside! Your body only goes into shock for a few seconds and then you adjust!

On Sunday we just rented some tubes and went on a 1-2 hour float down the river and then on Monday we were feeling ambitious so had them take us to the 8 mile drop off...this time we had two tubes and one big raft. We opted for no canoe this year, so really saying we went canoeing is a lie. We went rafting... we were rafting on Monday for about 7 hours! That last mile, we were ready to get back!

We had a great time! I only got dunked/full on tackled, i think it was two times and only fell off the raft backwards by accident once! Ethan did a flip off right after i fell off so we must have had a slick part we were sitting on :)

I wish i was brave enough to take my camera on the raft, we had so many photo ops on the river...daddy, trey and avery all jumped from a huge tree up in the air that went out over the river. I was called a chicken and bawked at but that's ok, i can take it...i have a phobia about jumping into water when i can't see what is under the water ( i had a hard time letting my kids too, but i just had to trust daddy, and cringe while they jumped!)

It was another fun trip, we always have lot's of laughing, lot's of good food (if you know the Hinkles, you know jason can cook!), lot's of kids squealing(boys) and even some bickering (girls, go figure). We already look forward to next year!!

Here are a few pictures from our trip...

Mile' and Ethan dragging one of the tubes down to the river

johnny was super excited to get this "treasure" off one of the tree limbs, that i couldn't quite reach! we always like to see how much stuff we can find

"but i want to squirt him right in the face!" -this is another "treasure" we picked up along the way

daddy dragging ethan through the current so they could go swim down the current

trey was always first to just get right in the water...it took the rest of us some courage!

last year we wore flip flops (obviously we hadn't gone to the river much) this year we all were sporting water shoes!!

I considered myself fortunate that we did not end up with any craw-dads in the van with us on the way home!