Camping on the Saco River

My car was pretty much fine, a few things needed to be done, so I was able to get on the road by 11am, about 4 hours later than expected. When I got to my best friend's place, we packed up the rest of car and took off. We decided to reverse our plans, and ended up doing Water Country on Tuesday. From there, we headed to the White Mountains for our canoe trip with Northern Extremes. About 15 minutes south of North Conway, NH, we decided to camp at White Ledge (I believe this was the one). We pulled up to a site, and put our tent up in the dark. All night we heard something dropping onto our tent, but didn't think anything of it. We woke up in the morning and saw all these carpenter ants on our tent. Looks like we were camping on top of their home. It was a rough night; sleeping on gravel.

We headed up to North Conway for our canoe trip; I decided that we should do the 20 mile trip. As we were packing up the van to go down to the river with Northern Extremes, these other guys were going to head down to the river as well. They had come from New York for this trip. These two guys did not have any of their stuff packed, so we waited for them. The driver was getting frustrated. We finally got to our drop off point, and we were supposed to pick up fire permits there, but nobody was around. Bummer. We left without it at 10:40am. I did not know what to expect of this river or this trip. I was pretty shocked at how shallow the Saco River was. My best friend and I decided that we were going to stop between 12:30pm and 1pm for lunch. So we paddled and paddled and floated and floated, dashing tree limbs and rocks. It was so sunny, you would have never thought that they were predicting thunderstorms. Upon arrive to the beach we were going to have lunch at, I fell out of the canoe. The canoe didn't tip, but I fell out of it. :) By this time I already had a burn on my legs (and burn blisters forming), so the scratches on my knees didn't help.

A couple hours after lunch, the sky had gotten dark. We didn't hear any thunder, so we weren't worried. All of it sudden, it started raining and then downpoured for about 15 minutes. The cool rain felt good on our burnt bodies. After we passed the second bridge, we thought we had heard thunder (but could have been traffic on the bridge), so we pulled off the river and waited for a little while. My best friend wanted to go a little further, so we went another mile. By then, we really thought it was thunder, so we set up camp at the 12 mile marker, or as I now call it, Mosquito Haven. I was wearing both sunscreen/bug lotion and bug spray and I was still attacked by a thousand mosquitos! Luckily we really had one mosquito that survived in the tent, otherwise we were only safe in there. Packing up in the morning, though, was rough! My best friend slept on a frog. LOL

The river ate my best friend's sunglasses, she had them on her hat, readjusted her hat, and they went *plump* into the river. Later, she was trying to swat the blackflies and her hat flew out of her hands and into the river. Luckily that floated. She was in such a panic that I was paddling backwards to turn around and she was paddling forward...wasn't working very well. In the end, I was able to balance the hat on my paddle and save it. LOL

We then took a wrong turn and went through a mini rapids area. :) That was fun! Heeheehee. During the whole trip we ran into about three trees, two rocks, and hit bottom four or five times. :) The Bog was beautiful!

We ended up getting to our pick up point early and we were exhausted. I couldn't wait to take a shower! That night we saw the Fantastic 4 in the movie theater, the first movie I had seen in about 2.5 years.