My Memorable Missouri trip

We are from Infosys and working for walmart at client location, Bentonville. For people who do not know, as I was before coming to this place, this is in Arkansas State of US. Lot of people here says that this is a natural state.
That name perfectly suits this state, the more you explore the more beautiful places you find. You will love it in fall colors season.

You wish to do some adventurous things and they turn out to be more than you expected sometimes. We had, at least I had, this sort of experience in one our recent trips.

We went to canoeing to River Of Life Farm. It’s a place in Missouri, a 3 hour drive from our place. We reached there at 4 - 4.30 in the evening and decided to start. Myron, who is the owner of boating club there gave some introduction about the river and some options All of us were new to canoeing, but we dared to start with our life jackets on in three boats.

Me, Sam and Srinivas in one boat, Sudheer(not me, my friend Gontu. I shall call with his surname :) ) and Naresh in one boat, Ramesh and Srikanth in another boat.
Myron gave directions how to canoe the boat, but it took some time to learn how to do. Of course, one of the boats turned upside down in first few minutes. Myron was capturing all the troubles from shoreJ.

The boats went different different directions and we had fun laughing at each other before our boat tilted to one side. All three of us fell down and we had to leave our paddles as the boat was heading towards us. Luckily, gontu’s boat was there just behind us. We all dragged our boat to one side of river and to our surprise we saw a snake in our boat. Its sleeping inside a bag present in boat. We three decided to go back and were looking for some direction. A couple who were canoeing came to us and told that the snake is venomous. They suggested some way back to starting place and all of them ( including gontu and naresh) left. Our new and interesting adventure started here.
We did not find any path in the direction given by couple. All trees, bushes and river.. the only option was to climb a big mountain. We don’t know where we would go, but we started trekking. The difficulty was with light as it was getting dark. We did not have much time there. A small funny incident happened here. Me and Sam stopped while climbing but Srinivas went ahead and disappeared. We shouted, but no response… then Sam went fast and he also got disappeared. Me climbing slowly, shouted for them but no replied. For one minute, I felt I am lost.. :).
We walked a lot on the mountain and finally we found some trekking path. The path was leading to different directions, don’t know which one to take. Few calculations based on water sound and finally we could find road. We almost decided to stay back in the jungle for that night J. And here our friends were searching for us.

It was almost 8 in the evening. Had some food and then we started our new exercise of building a camping tent. Someone was reading the instructions with the camp fire light and the remaining started construction. We could complete this beautiful tent in 15-20 minutes.

Then with the music on in our cars, we heated frozen foods on the grill. It was really a wonderful experience, camping ground on the side of river, with enough moonlight and camp fire.
The next morning we decided to canoe once again :), same way but the teams changed. We could complete our journey with out many hiccups this time.

When we went to pay money, Myron gave me a small booklet. You know what it is .. the details of different snakes (with photos) in and around the river :). He showed the copper field snake, which we saw in our boat, in that booklet.
The trip was awesome and as I was saying at least I can not forget this till I do one more of this sort …. Will come back when I do it again, see you….