Today we went white water rafting! It was AWESOME!!! We watched this video that explained how to float down a river in the (sometimes likely) event that we fall out of the raft. Then this dude explained some more river rules and made us feel comfortable about getting in a raft and shooting down class 3 & 4 rapids.

Let me back up… I need to talk about the bus a little here. Pulling up to our destinations in a huge coach bus is usually quite challenging for our driver as well as an abnormality for most of the people waiting to greet us. The rafting base camp was no different. We had to turn off of the normal road and down a steep gravel decline. Ray (the bus driver) hesitant but decided, probably against his better judgment, to go for it. He ended up having to back up it in order to get out!

Okay… so that was entertaining. Anyways… we went rafting and that was amazingly cool! My raft was in the front of the pack and we took all the rapids like pros. We went down one of the two class 4’s with ease… you know… because we’re pros J. As we looked back at the rest of the rafts we saw one raft suddenly sans its riders! We laughed at first and then were informed that we needed to paddle upstream and perform a river rescue situation. John Beed was in that boat! We safely rescued all the rafters, including their guide, and all was well. According to the guide in my raft… who was kinda the leader of the guides… very rarely does an entire raft buck it’s rafters off! It was one of those incidents that will be talked about for the rest of the season at base camp!

After rafting we hopped back in the bus for a quick 45 minute ride into Asheville, NC. We found Emmanuel Lutheran Church and plopped our stuff in their gym, which would be our bedroom for the night, then headed into town to find the Asheville Pizza & Brewery Co. They had some SERIOUSLY good pizza!!! After that we walked around downtown Asheville for a little bit. We soon learned that there is a Phish concert happening later tonight and there were a bunch of loopy character walking around. Quite the experience… we headed back to the church’s gym pretty quickly to hang out, play Frisbee and basketball.

So as of this post… that’s where we’re at! Now here’s a slideshow of pictures for you to look at! Check them out!

[Image by: OSLCmedia]

So day one was a pretty good day. We all gathered at church around 11:30am and hit the road a little after noon. Long bus rides with are always a great mingling time for everyone. We get up… walk around… sit with different people or hang out on the floor. It was a pretty low key day… we’re all looking forward to white water rafting tomorrow! Even John Beed said he wants to do it!!! Awesomeness!!!

Here’s some pictures of us on the bus! I took a video of the bus backing up a narrow drive to the dormitory tower. I’ll have that for you the next time I post… I forgot the video camera docking station on the bus tonight. FAIL!

By the way… if you do leave us a comment on any of these blog posts… I am likely to read them aloud over the microphone in the bus to the entire group.

Ministry Tour History

Back in 2003 (my senior year) Eagle’s Wings traveled down to Florida. We had a really cool bus driver named Ray. He played guitar and joined us for vespers on the beach in Marco Island one night… he and Mike Kramer jammed out on the beach during vespers… it was pretty epic! Guess who our bus driver is for this year’s ministry tour?!?!

RAY!!! Rock on!

[Image by: OSLCmedia]

My name is Graham Brenna and I’m one of the lucky chaperones on Ministry Tour 2009! Beginning Monday, June 8th Eagle’s Wings High School Choir and Hearts In Puppetry will be leaving for North Carolina. We will be gone for 8 days as we travel throughout the state and give our concert to different types of audiences ranging from retirement communities to other youth groups!

I will be blogging each day of the trip right here! There is a simple way to keep up with the blog. It’s called RSS which stands for ‘Real Simple Syndication’. RSS will send the blog posts to you so that you don’t have to remember to come to the blog each day. Click on the orange RSS logo in the top right of the blog. This will allow you to select which type of delivery you would like. Unless you are familiar with RSS readers such as Google Reader I would suggest that you have them delivered to you via email.

We are all really excited about this trip! More later!