gila river confluence

i was down south for the first week that i was here, doing surveys down in the yuma area and working our way back up to havasu. i had a blast! as you can see from the picture, we worked really, really hard! haha! pictured are dianne, shannon, amanda and me. one of the routes was a kyak route, which dianne and amanda did while me and shannon did another route along the gila river. after our routes were done we met up at the mouth of the gila river, where it dumps into the colorado. it was sooo deep! haha! just kidding! it was actually pretty shallow in the gila and i walked the 150 meters down stream to the colorado and went swimming in the river. it was kind of like a treadmill. i swam and i swam and couldn't make my way upstream because the current was pushing me down so well. at least i didn't end up down stream. because i stayed in the exact same spot the entire time, i viewed my swimming marathon a success! and when i got tired, i just stood up. yeah, not very deep either. the colorado came up to about my armpits or thereabouts. not too shabby!

while we were out "in the field" (complete with hotels) i had my birthday! i am now officially 27 years old, with shawn's birthday to follow on june 16th. since that's tomorrow, here's a little reminder to email him a birthday wish *wink, wink*
when we went out to do our surveys, it was just me and shannon, she sang "happy birthday" and "she's a jolly good fellow" with lots of "hip-hip-hooray's"! it was a wonderful morning. that afternoon we met up with dianne and amanda in a small, really small, incredibly small town called palos verdes in california. we had a kitchen in our room, which was incredibly nice since there was really no place to eat. we also had a toilet that didn't flush, spiders that crawled around on the wall next to the shower, dead cockroaches in the sink, and the motel "office" was the bar making it an altogether great place to stay in. hehe! anyhow, that night shannon made me cupcakes for my birthday. it was so sweet! so i stayed on my bed during the evening, reading and pretending to not know what was going on. it's really hard when we were all crammed into the same motel room, but i did it. and i was very touched. so i did have a bit of a birthday party and those cupcakes were great breakfasts for the next couple of days. :)