Floating the Boise River Again...

This morning Shane and I woke up extra early so that we could float the river. We wanted free parking and so we figured the earlier the better. We headed out by 8:15 am. We first had to drop one car off at Ann Morrison Park (our get out point) and then drive up to Barber Park (our drop in point). On our way up to Barber Park we noticed that Warm Springs had been closed to construction and so about a mile away from our turn we had to turn around, head back, and find another way. We were sweating because it was almost nine and we didn't really want to pay for parking and hadn't brought any money along. We went the long way around and sure enough were able to find one of two free parking spaces. We climbed out, grabbed the raft and headed for the pumps. Funny thing, we were so excited about floating and our free parking we didn't realize the pumps were time operated and wouldn't be open for an hour! What did we do? We sat and started to manually blow up the raft ourselves. What a sight I'm sure we were. Lucky for us and our precious hot air, a couple came by and let us use their pump before they blew up their own raft. We were on the water within minutes and it was fantastic. We were the only ones around. No boats to maneuver around, no one to shoot us with water guns, no one but fishermen! We did the four mile float in two hours and only had a few squirmishes on the way. We mowed over to rocks on two of the three drops, (not ripping our raft thankfully) scraping our behinds quite nicely. We also only hit one branch instead of the several like our last float down. It was a beautiful morning and the water was moving fast and steady, a perfect day for water play.