Noel, Missouri

The canoe trip. Doesn’t everyone have a summer trip with your friends, story?
This is one of those stories. Freshman year of college my friends and I piled in a couple cars to go 500 miles away to the Elk River. This is in the mighty town of Noel Missouri a couple hundred feet North of Arkansas.

It is a beautiful place- lush and hidden, quiet, subtropical. This was the year of the great Midwestern floods in 1993.

Too much happened that trip to put to any words that would do it justice. We laughed, we fought, and we played cards when it rained. We made it home tired, smelly, and sun burnt…we had a good time.

Some things have changed among us, for the better I hope. I also hope that we can look back on this trip 20 or 30 years from now with the same enthusiasm that we had when we were there.