Disorientation Week: Gently Down the Stream

I can canoe. Canoe? :-)

The week leading up to graduation is called DiSoriEntaTioN week and MBA2s plan all sorts of fun activities. I wasn't able to participate in all of them, but I did attend several events, so you will see a few entries for each event I went to.

The first one was a canoe trip down the Huron river, which flows through Ann Arbor. It was a gorgeous day and SO much fun! I shared a canoe with two of my roomies, Mike and Shannon. Somehow I got the middle seat in the bottom of the canoe, but it wasn't so bad. Since I couldn't really steer the canoe, I had less of a job to do, and part way through the journey we gave my paddle to another canoe that had overturned and lost a paddle. So then I didn't have to do ANY work! :-) The trip took a total of about 3 hours or so and about 60 people went.

Me and my friend Sach:

Here we are listening to instructions:


Our royal chariots:
Shannon, Mike, and me, ready to take on the river!

This is the family of a guy from my section named Cory. He is very nice, super smart, and somehow managed to be one of the only people who always did the homework despite having three little girls at home. He used to be a professional beach volleyball player and showed his athletic skills by doing a backflip off the back of the canoe! You can tell his daughters just adore him. His wife Kerri was also very nice whenever I saw her at events. They looked so cute in their canoe, I had to take a photo.


Here is a closer photo of the girls. Unfortunately, the middle daughter Izzy was diagnosed with leukemia last year, so it has been a very trying year for their family. But they have been amazing through it, and Izzy is getting better every day!

I cracked up because their youngest daughter Ryan was laying like this on the bow of the boat the whole time, like a figurehead. :-)


Some fellow canoers:

Looking back at a few of the bridges and other canoes coming down the river:

Me and Mike:
Shannon, our canoe master:

These are two of my classmates, Amer and Chaumanix. They were on the M-Trek (a pre-school trip) with Shannon and apparently had trouble with their canoe and flipped it on a river trip during that. So they were happy to be doing so well on this trip! Paddle High-Five!

At one point, we hooked up with two other canoes and drifted down the river together. This is a girl named Kati and Shannon:

A girl named Elise and my friend Sach:

A view of the river:
Me, Mike, Elise, Sach, and in the way back is a guy named Steve:

Luckily, we made it down the river without incident, although at one point we went through some tiny rapids and almost got caught on a huge rock underneath the surface. But we survived!