July 4th: canoo/kayak, and america celebrations!

We got up early-ish and then got ready to get going. There is a river at the back of Jill and Age's house which is really good for canooing on. It also flooded a year or so earlier and caused lots of damage to their house. I was really impressed with the work Age has done to it...

We loaded some kayaks and canooes into cars...

I didn't take my camera with me while canooing because I didn't want to drop it into the water. I wasn't really sure if that would happen since I haven't been canooing in a while, so I didn't want to risk it. Age got a couple of shots though.

I'm hanging onto the side of the river so the canoo doesn't float away. The other person from the canoo went for a jump in on this rope swing we found.

I decided to also try a jump into the river from this rope. Age took a video of it. Unfortunately I miscalculated the amount of grip that I would need to apply to hold onto the rope! I kind of pulled my hand a bit and lost grip and then had a very not-elegant flop into the water!

I canooed with a another of their friends who'd been to South America a few times travelling around the place, and it sounds really amazing. She hitch hiked on the back of trucks around the place sometimes, and apparently on some buses, it's kind of normal to ride on the roof of it... She said there are some areas where you might get killed. But she didn't get killed.

Ow! My hand... I think I actually took this photo after it started to look quite a bit better. There was a point in time at which wondered if my finger might fall off. I think I probably pulled the nerves in the end of it.

We had brought the canoes upriver to some point, left the cars there and then paddled downstream all the way to Jill and Age's house. So, at the end we just dragged the canoes up out of the river and someone got the car.

I think we did something in the afternoon and then we headed over somewhere to do something for the July 4th celebration, since it was July 4th.

Age's friend had access to a rooftop carpark where maybe we would be able to see some fireworks. A lot of people were really unsure what they wanted to do. I think some people were a bit over the holiday and wanted to just chill out. I didn't really mind too much.

We ended up going into the city and testing out this rooftop carpark. It turned out that in between us and where the fireworks would be, there was a cluster of tall buildings. So we couldn't really see the fireworks. When the fireworks started, the girl from the canoe, two other guys and myself rode the elevator to the street and then hustled over to near the river so we could see the fireworks.

The fireworks seemed quite a bit more impressive than any fireworks I'd heard before. There was lot more "boom" sounds. It was a cool atmosphere with the city all around and people being all excited. It seemed like a really impressive event. A bit surreal. Songs were playing, somehow choreographed with the fireworks. I think they were fairly American. It all was a bit American in some kind of a way.

After the fireworks, we wandered back. One of the guys works as a person who takes people on ghost tours. So he knows lots of history about the city. While walking back he took us into the lobby of some kind of fancy hotel. It was very funny. He was quite drunk I think - in an unhideable way - and his t-shirt was soaked in sweat from that fact and that it was very very hot and humid in Nashville at this time. So he was going to lead us into the ground floor of the fancy hotel and we'd just pretend like we were staying there. The other two were unconvinced that it would be very wise, but It seemed to work. We also checked out the toilets here because supposedly those toilets are very famous and have been featured in lots of music videos and some other things.

Then we walked back up to the carpark. We hung around for a while to wait for the worst of the traffic to leave the city. Driving back on some highways, there was lots of fireworks all around us from people's backyards. Very cool atmosphere.

We got home and I went to sleep at some point.