White Water Rafting

Last week Andy went on a white water rafting trip with his Google team. They took a bus up to the Kern River Tuesday afternoon and spent the night at a motel/lodge type place.

Tuesday evening they had dinner and hung out by the pool.

 Wednesday morning they hit the river. There were six boats of Googlers. 

 Andy ended up getting on a really good boat. They had a veteran guide, and all the guys in the boat were pretty strong and able to paddle well.

Because of all of the rain we've had this past year, the river was pretty intense. In their nine mile trek, they went down ten Class 4 rapids.

For reference, the rafting company they went with won't even take people down Class 5 rapids so it was quite a wild ride!

As they went down their first rapid, all of a sudden Andy heard his guide tell out, "Grab him!" One of the smaller guys in the front got thrown off right away.

Andy looked down and the guy was in the water right next to him, so he grabbed him and pulled him into the raft.

While Andy had a really solid guide and group of guys on his raft, some of the other boats weren't as fortunate. Andy said that at one point he looked at one of the other boats going through the rapids, and every guy was airborn. Their whole boat had gotten launched out of the raft.

When Andy sent me these pictures for the blog, it made me laugh that he's basically smiling in every single picture (and there were tons more that I didn't use). Clearly he had a good time. Or he thought he was in a photo shoot for a rafting magazine!