By way of readjusting to living in Saint Louis, Anne and I took a float trip today. With temps soaring into the nineties, what better way to enjoy the great outdoors and still not lose your cool than getting a little wet. We chose to float the Meramec River, which during flooding season along with its bigger cousins, the Mississippi and the Missouri can at times make Saint Louis virtually an island, cutoff from the rest of the world with their raging waters. Not to worry now, in the dogdays of summer, the Meramec is a large enough a river to still have enough water in it, to keep it flowing, but only just. The Meramec is also the closest floating river to Saint Louis. This adjacency can cause the lose morals that the Sodom and Gomorrah title refers to, but that kind of behavior is reserved primarily for the weekend. The outfitter that we booked runs five tours on Saturday and tomorrows are all sold out, while today they only had one tour and it wasn’t even full. We rented a canoe, while the rest of the people taking the shuttle up the river were all in rafts. We launched ourselves first and never saw any of the other people again. We did see a few kayaks and one rather noisy johnboat. Its loud outboard motor flushed an osprey that had been perched in the tree above where we had stopped and had had our lunch. We were first to finish and get back to the cars. The outfitter had closed shop for the day, or so it seemed. We just left our boat at the top of the ramp and the paddles and vests outside the office. I hope that they don’t go walkabout.