Woke up around 7. Quick breakfast and chat with other visiting guests and we were off on the road again to get to Moxie for the day's rafting. Thankfully, this time the drive was 5 minutes instead of 9 hours. Moxie's improvised base camp was a repurposed offseason ski hill, with no signage anywhere except on the road
The Moxie gang we were very laid back (check in time is 8:30 but we didn't get to the river until about 10:30) and in fine form:
Are you here to ski? We usually get an inch or so by 10. You've got to be ready to go by 11:30, and off the hill by 2 'cuz it melts pretty fast.
Comedy aside, the trip went pretty smoothly except for a few minor issues:
- We signed up for the 'Double Trouble' package which involves running the river twice back-to-back, and that had to be cancelled because it turned out only two people (us) were interested in it (better marketing for next year would help!)
- We got stuck with the Party Boat (aka The Cadillac), a somewhat oversized raft which was heavier (and thus tougher to steer)
- The other 5 people in our boat had never rafted before and were more interested in sight-seeing than paddling so we didn't have much opportunity to surf any hydraulics
Other than that, we had a fantastic guide (J.), the river was beautiful, lunch was great, and the last two Class IV rapids were a blast. Due to the cancelled Double Trouble trip, Moxie was good enough to give us a CD of trip photos for free. However, even though they had my credit card on file, they still made me call head office to get reimbursed for the second half of the trip instead of simply crediting it back as soon as they knew the second trip had to be cancelled. Ah, well, water over the dam. ;-)
Some frothy Class III whitewater: I'm in the front with the black/orange sleeves and blue/white paddle; SWMNBN is behind me with the ballcap under her helmet
Catching some air
Later that day, I decided to wander around the farm to check out its residents:
Back at the B&B (because apparently I have 'computer geek' tattooed across my forehead) our host D. asked me to fix her wifi so that her guests could share it.
Within 5 minutes I had hacked into her router, disabled her WEP protection (she decided that would be simpler than telling people what the network password was), and assigned a new router password to keep people like me out in future. Note to would-be h4xx0rs / network admins: using 192.168.{0,1,2}.1 as your gateway IP and "admin"/"admin" as your username/password makes getting in suprisingly simple.
Dinner was at the attached Warfield House Restaurant, and though they were apparently out of almost half the menu (this being the off-season, they're not open Mon-Wed), everything we wanted was available and worth blogging home about, including SWMNBN's 2 required Cokes.
Tomorrow, it's off to Shelburne Falls for some quick sightseeing and then nor'eastward to my dad's place in Essex, MA.
