Manti's Day

Manti loves the outdoors. He has intimate knowledge of how plants live and grow and how the animals interact,... he's just that well acquainted with nature. So of course, his 20th birthday needed to be something fitting for him and a party just isn't quite his style. I really felt the need to do something special with him because,... he's my first baby, and my gut tells me this is my last birthday with him being my "little boy". He'll be moving on soon,...I just feel it coming. I SO dread it too, so I don't want to lose any last moments I may have where he feels like my "little boy". Tommy and I are struggling hard right now too. Everything is going against us and that'll be my next blog so watch for it. That meant we had to be frugal as possible,...but we're talking about the nature boy, so frugal works.

We own a canoe, its old and not especially pretty, but its ours and it holds 3 of us (even though I hear it silently wishing ONE of us would lose weight). For his birthday Friday, we loaded the canoe onto the top of my Durango and headed south. The famous Chattahoochee River is just a few miles away, and we did everything we could think of to put that boat in any other water,...and ended up in Brush Creek, which actually feeds into the Hooch. It isn't quite as nasty,...but it isn't what I would call clean either. I'll show you....

Nasty, right?

This shows you we STILL haven't really recuperated from the floods of last September. This trash came from somewhere way upstream. I was shocked at how many basketballs we saw in trees! But the trash was just everywhere. So sad...so nasty.

It was everywhere that water could shove it, especially inlets and mini-coves.

As you can see, there were places the water barely moved at all.

So we traveled down the river and across the river and around islands .... and we saw lots of beautiful things in spite of the trash.

Isn't this THE COOLEST tree?

That's an island on each side. Neeeeat!

Look how pretty some of the islands were!

This picture is awesome. We watched a deer jump in the water from an island (to the left and not in the picture) and he swam across in front of us (at a distance of course) to the land on the right side. You can't see him too well in this picture since I reduced the size, but you can see something is there and the stream of water behind him. He was really moving fast!

So it was a success. The guys had fun, Manti loved it,...

Tommy loved it... (hey, do he and Manti have the exact same pose and facial expression on?)

And I admit it,...I had fun too.