On a boat.

This last weekend we went to Lake Martin in Alabama with my family. We survived the 6 hour trip (which involved 2 stops and only minimal screaming from Rory) and settled into the rental house Friday night.

The big thing we had planned was to go boating on Saturday. Dad rented a pontoon boat that you could supposedly ski behind, so Saturday morning, Dad, me, Chris, and Rory went down to the boat place together to pick it up. Rory got fitted for a life jacket and she was adorable in it! She didn't even complain about it!

Well, just as we got on the boat and are about to head out, the guy says "Oh, by the way, the bridge you have to go under is gonna be a pretty tight squeeze. Good luck." I'm thinking he's just being overly cautious, being that we are borrowing his boat, y'know.

Ok, no. He was NOT kidding. The bridge we had to squeeze under was just a regular old road over the water, nothing special, no upward slope to the bridge AT ALL. I wish I had a picture to illustrate how not tall this bridge was. We start approaching this bridge and quickly realize we are just barely going to make it... I'm talking MILLIMETERS. Chris throws the boat into idle, takes off the "windshield" over the driving console and then runs to the front of the boat and "catches" the bridge with his hands and starts pulling the boat under. Dad on the other hand is at the back of the boat trying to figure out how to get the folded down sun cover to fit through.

Rory and I are sitting on the floor so our heads don't get cut off.

Dad ends up on his back on the seat, using his FEET to push up on the bridge to make the boat just BARELY scrape under the first set of bridge rafters... there were 3 more to go. I didn't even let myself think about how the crap we would get out from underneath this thing if we got stuck.

THANK GOD the boys managed to get us through and all we did for the rest of the 20 minute ride back to the house was talk about how crazy that was and how we couldn't believe we made it. We then picked up Lauren, Michael, Dustin, and Amanda at the rental house's dock and spent about an hour and a half boating around and attempting to ski (not me! :)) until we got driven off the lake by a rainstorm. We ended up coming back to the house for a couple hours in the afternoon until the rain stopped. Then we all went back out to return the boat and everyone got to experience the crazy bridge.

When we returned the boat, the rental guy said the lake is running about 8 inches higher than normal. Shocker.

Rory had a great time though. She was all about standing in the boat, holding onto the side which she was just tall enough to see over. She liked it best when we went fast. It was hilarious watching her watch everyone try to ski. We were joking that it must have been strange for her to watch us throw people in the water, then drag them around behind us on a rope... for fun. From the looks on her face, it did not appear that she understood the "fun" part of it. :)