Adventurelaus

What better way to experience your first overnight camping kayak trip than to take your whole family and friends along.  I relied on my experience of prior overnight bike and hike trips but packing for 7 people seemed to accumulate lots of stuff and I seriously doubt all the stuff would fit into the kayaks and that the kayaks would be overloaded. The bad part of the Midwest, or at least Iowa, is that it's all heavily fertilized and chemically treated farmland around here.  So even with the great filtration system out there I don't want to drink that water.  That meant packing 9 gallons of water for a two night trip on top all the other stuff.  Surprising though everything fit into the kayaks without a problem   This trip was also the first time kayaking for our friends.  Even loaded down they didn't have any problems of their new found sport.  We all had an enjoyable 1.6 mile paddle from the Whitebreast beach to the Hickory Ride hike-in/paddl...

Ever since we took part of the DNR's intro to kayaking, while we stayed at the Honey Creek Resort on Rathbun lake in Iowa, did Oskar want to kayaking.  One night after sailing at Big Creek we rented kayaks from the marina and took them for a spin.  We got to check out some blue-green algae really close up.  These were the sit-on-top type that I don't care much for. This weekend we rented rented two single and one tandem kayaks from ISU's recreational services.  Saturday we went to Brushy Creek state park.  The dammed lake is fairly new and has lot of dead trees in it.  That makes exploring the lake with kayaks that much more fun.  A drawback that the lake has is that the shore doesn't offer places to beach a kayak for lunch.  So we ended up eating it on the lake.  Oskar kayaking on Brushy Creek lake Heidi and Melissa kayaking on Brushy Creek lake Lunch on Brushy Creek lake Its amazing how well Oskar can handle the ka...