Meyer Family in McCall!

The Meyer Family reunion was a blast, even without my brothers in attendance. My mom and Leo made the trip along with my niece, Kylee, who is so beautiful at age 13 that she must take after her Aunt Jenny. We headed up to McCall on Friday night and stopped at the Banks Cafe for dinner--not long after that we had to stop so Jenny could hurl. Oh, family road trips. On Saturday we took the kayaks and rented a canoe to take up the North Fork Meanders on the Payette River. Yes, Jeff made us paddle UPstream! Peyton was in his own kayak for awhile and did pretty well. Jenny and Kylee took a turn in the topo duo and just kept paddling in circles! Grandma Judy decided she wanted to try the kayak to see how hard it was (didn't she notice Jenny and Kylee going in circles???)--she decided it was harder than it looked. Then Jenny had this "great" idea to get in the topo duo with Grandma Judy--as if the trip with Kylee and watching my mom struggle wasn't foreshadowing enough. We attempted to get around a fast-moving current about three times before Jeff said to head back to the nearest beach for lunch. By this time all our attempts to paddle upstream in the current had caused us take on a lot of water (no, we didn't wear kayak skirts for our "leisurely" trip up-river). So of course it was a **tch to paddle with all that extra water in the boat. And as soon as we got a little tipsy, the water sloshed around and made us go a lot tipsy, and we were about 6 feet from shore when a "a lot tipsy" suddenly meant "tipped over" in the 10 degree water. Damn it was cold! I couldn't stop laughing, though! It was the best part of the whole trip to see my mom and me try to swim out of an upside down 50-pound kayak! I have to mention here that my mom swam straight for shore but I, being the wife of a kayaker, kept hold of my paddle AND the boat and swam to shore with all my gear in tact. It was about 15 minutes later that we realized the camera was in my lake-soaked life jacket. I decided not to try and turn it on--I laid it in the sun and watched the condensation under the LCD screen get steamy. When we got back to the house I put in the oven at 100 degrees for about two hours and now it's as good as new! Our pictures we had taken didn't even get ruined! I'm a genius. Here are some of those miracle pictures.