Action-packed visit from Nahma and Bumpa

Before I get into our busy last couple of weeks, I thought I'd share some freshly blooming flowers from our yard for those of you still snowbound and freezing in da North, eh...? Our daffodils have just started blooming, as has the Callery pear in our front yard:


Last I wrote, we were preparing for our big Super Bowl party. The event was a good success, with many a person having an enjoyable time watching a nicely competitive game. Unfortunately, right afterward, Stephen came down with a stomach bug that had the lil' guy spewing from both ends. Fortunately, the kids were healthy enough by the end of the week, when their Nahma and Bumpa (Ann and Rich Pruden) came down for a visit. They arrived on Thursday, and on Friday I took the day off and Rich and I went on another nice canoe trip on the Saline River:


As the picture shows, the weather was fairly pleasant if somewhat windy. After a day of canoeing and hunting for petrified wood, we went out for Mexican that evening. The next day I went to Little Rock to assist on that archeological dig some more, and Hope, her folks, and our kids went on a road trip to northern Louisiana to do some shopping. Sunday turned out to be another nice day weather-wise, so we decided to undertake a grand adventure that afternoon. We (Rich, Kenny, Beth, and I) took the motor boat down to the Longview Landing on the Saline River about 30 miles southwest of Monticello:


We hadn't had the boat out in a while, so we figured it would be good to give it a run. The Saline River is fairly high now, so we weren't worried about shallow shoals or sunken logs (not this time of year, at least). We were just going to go upstream a fair distance, stopping at the occasional gravel bar to look for petrified wood. Kenny had a ball looking for petrified wood, and Beth enjoyed finding empty mussel shells, driftwood, and rocks to play with. She also enjoyed the big piles of sand that sometimes built up along these bars:


We also watched out for wildlife. We saw lots of turtles sunning themselves on logs along the river banks, and plenty of birds. Fortunately, we did not see any live wild hogs. We did, however, find a jawbone of one that had died some time before:


As you can see, wild hogs (aka razorbacks) can do some nasty damage with their teeth, if they want to! We just kept heading up stream, passing landmarks we learned while canoeing the river. Our gas gauge seemed to indicate we still had plenty of fuel, so we headed up to a cool old railroad bridge:


This is when the adventures really began... We stopped at a big gravel bar just below the bridge, and continued our search for petrified wood chunks. We all got out of the boat, which we had thought was adequately beached on a gravel shoal. All of us were out scouring the island when Kenny shouted something about the boat. I looked up in time to see Rich darting across the island, tossing aside his recently collected pieces of wood and emptying his pockets of their contents. The reason for his behavior--the boat had floated away from the shoal, and was now drifting down the stream in a rapid current! We had anchors and ropes with us, but in our casual carelessness, hadn't thought to use them. Rich pulled off his boots, took the life vest I was offering him, and plunged hat and all into the cold river water. This was our only chance to catch the boat--being on an island, we couldn't run along the banks to catch it. Fortunately, the boat floated into an eddy and quit drifting away at such a pace, and Rich was able to catch up to the boat, start the engine, and return safely (if soaking wet) to the island:


Fortunately, the day was warm and the river wasn't ice cold. We were also within cell phone range, so I called Hope and Ann, and asked them to bring dry clothes for Rich. We met them at a boat landing about a mile downstream, and Rich got into some dry clothes for the return trip. It was getting late, so we had the kids go back with Hope and Ann, and we took off downstream, confident that we had enough gas to make it back to the boat launch we had left the van and trailer at... Well, we were wrong--we ran out of gas about 8 miles short of our goal! We were just short of a known boat landing named Gee's Landing, so we paddled and used the trolling motor to get the last quarter-mile to this landing. We figured we'd be able to use my cell phone to call home and ask Hope to pick us up. Guess what--no cell phone reception!! We ended up walking about a half-mile down the road to a lone house that had a land line that we used to call Hope (thank goodness they were home!). We returned to the landing to wait for Hope (about a 45 minute drive away) while darkness fell and the buzzards and coyotes literally circled around us... Hope arrived and we were able to get back to the van to drive up to Gee's Landing to pick up the boat, and finally returned about 9 p.m. that night. Whew!

Hope's parents left yesterday around noon, and got back to their place in Michigan in the wee hours of this morning. Today, I went to El Dorado to see if I could get this root canal finished (not yet, it turns out), and Kenny also went to the dentist and got a baby tooth pulled that refused to come out even after the adult tooth appeared to replace it. This weekend we are going to central Arkansas for a weekend long archeology workshop (I'm going to this--Hope and the kids are playing tourist/shoppers again). Then next week I leave for a week long work trip to the Carolinas...busy, busy, busy!!