I did something real dumb over the weekend. Real dumb.

The family and I went rafting down the Oneida Narrows in Idaho over the weekend. We had five homemade pontoons and 3 tubes. The pontoon people used oars but the tube people used their legs, as the river was a little shallow and most of the time we could touch. It was a gawgeous day and the scenery was breathtaking. Most of the ride we just floated, but we hit a few light rapids every so often which dunked most everyone and scraped up some knees.

This is a stolen picture from someone else's blog about rafting the Oneida Narrows. But it's pretty much exactly what we did.

Jack, Maddi, and Sami gearing up for the Oneida Narrows. Sami was the only one who rafted down--Maddi just likes to wear lifejackets.

This is me getting ready for the float. I drove down with the grandkids for the first two hours then jumped in for the remaining, oh, 6 hours after that on just an inner tube.

We got started a little late in the day--2:00ish--and two of the smarter kids (the girls) got about about 5:00 p.m. after they got dunked. They wanted to give us a little more time so they gave us an ETA point about an hour down the river where we could meet then go get some suppa.

When we got to the rendez-vous point at about 6:00ish, a couple of us made a gross error and decided to keep floating down "to the end", not realizing the end was quite a ways away (although one of the sons-in-law was smart enough to get out right then). We also neglected to tell our other children that we would be continuing or where to meet us. Instead, we just left them hanging for about 3 hours, worried sick that we had drowned.

What happened is that we separated: my daughter-in-law and the hubby together, me and my son together, and my other son-in-law by himself as it turned out. We kept thinking the end would be "just around the corner". But we passed many a corner and there was no end in sight.

It started to get real dark, the sun set, and the temp dropped into the 50s/low 60s. You would think we would get out of the water as the temp dipped? Oh, no, we decided to stay in. Until we were all pre-hypothermia. In fact, my lips turned blue towards the end there.

Eventually the hubby and daughter-in-law abandoned ship and started walking. They knew we was in trouble with a capital UH-OH. Myself and my son (who was almost neck-deep in water at this point) chose to stay into the water until nearly 9 p.m. when we flagged down some help at a neighboring house. P.S. No cell phone service there!

My smart kids found us all at this point but we were shivering beyond control. We had to strip down and turn on the heat full blast (while the even-temperatured passengers nearly passed out from heat) and try to warm ourselves up. My son was in somewhat bad shape-- he was even a little delirious that last little 30 mins.

Gosh, I just wished I would've listened to my smarts and gotten out of the water earlier. That or

just maybe communicated my plans to the other people. Next time I think I'll plan a little bit better.

Amen.