Kayaking the Chicago

We grabbed some banh mi for lunch. It was quite an ordeal. We went to several places but apparently banh mi is the only food available in Chicago on Mondays. Poor guys.

Sus, Brandon, Natalie and I all kayaked the Chicago River.

That blob in the middle of the river is Goose Island, which I thought was just a beer company and didn't know was an actual place.

After all of that pain to get those damn banh mi sammies, they gave Natalie one with meat. She doesn't eat meat, and rather than just throw it away she sat and meticulously removed the meat so she could eat the bread. Sad!

People in Chicago are so economically challenged that they are forced to drink po milk just to make ends meet.

I think I may have some people buried here. We keeps it Bohemian, not Austro-Hungarian Imperial, up in here.

There was a simple choice at hand.

Meramec River Styles

Emma and Tyler and their dog Finn were new participants in our river floating. It was fun to have new people around to mix things up a bit. They were very intense about camp cooking. I wonder if they haven’t been camping a ton and so wanted to do “real” camping and the rest of us realize that float camping is more about sleeping off a hangover while inside a tent than any sort of communal experience with nature.

One unfortunate part about this trip is we didn’t go with the rafts like we usually do, we did kayaks. It's rumored that this fateful mistake was the brainchild of a certain Lydia Chlamydia. Well with a kayak you are forced to lay your legs out in the sun to be roasted like a delicious chickens. Well despite reapplying my sun goop more than once, I got the worst sunburn of my life. I never knew, or really needed to consider, that when you get sunburn your skin doesn’t turn red because it was burned so much as blood is moving to the area in order to repair the damage done to it by the menacing nuclear reactor in the sky. Well, if you get a really bad sunburn then a really too large amount of blood flows to the scene of the crime and… you get swelling. Over the next few days my legs and especially my ankles got so swollen that it was painful for me to walk.

The river is where cool kids wearing Walmart's hottest styles go to be seen.

Every year running somebody tries to mess with my freedoms so I have no choice but to wear this shirt.

Paddlesport for Everyone!

Missouri state parks: once you pop you just can't stop.

We met up with Zoe and Spencer at Crowder State Park for what is humorously referred to as "paddlesport".

Someone insisted on getting a standing paddle board. It was a little windy and... just seemed like an invitation for me to take a big drink. No thanks.

Earlier somebody was like “Let’s not kayak Crowder State Park” and I was like “Water you talking about?” The park and the 18-acre Crowder Lake were named after Maj. General Enoch H. Crowder, who was born in nearby Edinburg, MO.

When we could paddle no more we ditched those two and hit the next park. All's fair in love, war, and parks.

The 1868 bridge at Locust Creek Covered Bridge State Historic Site is about half as long as its name. After World War II, the course of Locust Creek was changed and the bridge spanned a dry creek bed.

I thought it was cool that this graffiti was so old that it was sort of a historical element of its own.

Checked out the crib at Gen. John J. Pershing Boyhood Home State Historic Site in Laclede, MO. He lead the American Expeditionary Forces in WW I and was the only living person to attain the six star rank of General of the Armies.

Admired the prairie grass at Pershing State Park, situated three miles west of Laclede in Linn County, Missouri. Within the boundaries of the park are two Native American burial mounds and a former village site.