Several youth and adult chaperones (and some memebers of their families) from St. Katharine Drexel embarked on a trip to the Frio River in Uvalde County on Thursday July 26, 2007.  Those going on the trip were:  Joe & Bridget Landin and family, Vicki & Robert Jozwiak, Maria Arteaga with Jackie, Freddy, & Jiovanni as well as the following youth: Jason Kaminski, Josh Faldyn, Jacob Diehl, Edmundo Avila, Dorian Neron, Paige Toman, Lauren Jackson, & Gaby Avila.

The group embarked around noon, but not before receiving a blessing from Fr. James Burkart.  After a couple of stops and some hours of driving we arrived at our temporary residence near Concan at about 5:30 pm.  The very lovely cabin where we were to stay belongs to fellow parishioners Mary Ann & Harold Garrett.  The Garrett’s very graciously and generously offered the use of the cabin to the SKD youth for their trip.

We all unpacked belongings and food and set about exploring the surrounding areas near the cabin and began dinner preparations.  We were treated to a wonderful dinner of salad, steaks, and baked potatoes.  Vicki Jozwiak was our resident chef for our trip and our stomachs were so blessed to have her with us.  Also we were blessed to have Katharine & Andrew Jozwiak and the Bezubs join us for dinner as they were staying in nearby Garner State Park camping.

Everyone just relaxed at the cabin for the evening by way of roasting marshmallows, enjoying the hot tub, and playing games.

Friday morning everyone awoke and feasted on sausage and eggs with biscuits and fruit.  That gourmet coffee hit the spot while enjoying the early morning on the cabin’s front porch.  We were also able to see the deer from the porch at different times of the day but especially when the feeder went off.

Friday we went a couple of times down the river from 7 Bluffs to Frio country.  The float took approximately and hour and a half and was a relatively calm ride down the Frio.  We went back to the cabin for lunch in between river rides.

Friday night we enjoy a supper of exquisite chicken Parmesan and Fetuccinni Alfredo.  Of course we also got some wonderful desserts of Pina Colada Cake and Vicki’s famous bread pudding - eat your heart out folks!  The rest of the evening passed with a meditation session led by Barbara Bezub and continued with walks around the property and games galore.

Saturday the group woke up to a fabulous meal of French toast gourmet style a la Vicki.  Yum, yum.  Had I known what a long day it was going to be I would’ve taken a second helping.

The plan for Saturday was to take a longer river float.  We studied several maps at the cabin and decided to enter the river at Mager’s Crossing.  It looked like we were only going to double our river time on this one float.  We knew we didn’t have time for 2 floats of what we had done before because we needed to eat lunch and get ready for Saturday evening mass.

Let me tell you folks - maps can be very deceiving.  We finally entered the river a little after 11 am after we waited for Robert to drop off the trailer at our exit point and Joe drove him back up to us.  None of us had watches or cell phone so we were literally out of touch with Joe and couldn’t contact him to come get us any closer.

It started out as a nice, new, adventuresome float.  There were some awesome bluffs, houses, and areas along the way.  Parts of this section of the river were wider and deeper than what we had already been through.  We also stopped a couple of times so the guys could jump off a low point where everyone else was jumping and also at some places to swing off a rope into the river.  Had we known how long it was ultimately going to take, I think we would’ve skipped those stops.

After a couple of hours we wondered where in the world 7 Bluffs was.  We kept floating and looking for our previous entrance.  At least we knew how long it was going to take from there.  At this point many of us were hungry and thirsty.  Some (myself included) of us were already scratched up and banged up from avoiding rocks and trees.  Many of us started paddling to help go faster especially since when we looked behind us we saw huge rain clouds.  We past 7 Bluffs finally at 3pm.  If we had had a cell phone we could’ve called Joe -but by the time he picked up Robert so they could go back and get the other vehicle and trailer we could have floated down to our exit at Frio Country.  We finally got to our exit point at about 4:15pm and by the time we got dried and all our tubes and stuff into the vehicles we had to rush back to the cabin.  We got back at about 4:40pm (rain had just started to come down) and not all of us had time to shower - it wasn’t as though we were dirty - we had just taken a 5 hour bath!

We scrambled to eat our dinner which consisted of hamburger steak, gravy, mashed potatoes, and grilled veggies and we hurried out the door to mass.

Mass was in the nearby town of Leakey.  We had been forewarned that there may or not be a priest officiating.  We lucked out and there was a priest from Del Rio there to say mass for us.  The little quant church of St. Raymond’s was very packed and because we didn’t get there early enough we ended up sitting apart from one another.  Fr. Jose gave a great homily about how much time we spend in 60 years eating, sleeping, and working and how we need to give more time to God who gives us all things including our time.  Some of the songs  we sung were a throw back to about 20 years ago for be but it was a nice mass with a few bilingual parts.  The people seemed nice and genuine.

After mass we headed back to the cabin.  The youth had wanted to go to the dance held at Garner State Park but we were afraid it was going to rain some more and we had heard there was a flash flood warning for most of Uvalde county.  So we stayed at the cabin the rest of the night.  The kids threw water balloons at each other, played games, talked, and watched movies.  Oh - and ate more desserts and left overs.

Sunday morning came with a little bit of rain, some sunshine, and more rain.  We ate a breakfast of muffins and bagels and began to gather our belongings and clean up the cabins.  There were a lot of sheets to wash and areas to clean up.  We had a lunch of french bread pizza made to order and headed out beginning at 1pm.

All in all it was a fantastic, memory filled weekend that I’m sure none of us are soon to forget.  Especially the moments like floating into trees, jumping off ropes, great food, great fellowship games (I was floating down the river when I saw…. remember guys?) and popping tubes.

Thanks to all those who helped (especially for our wonderful meal coordinator Vicki Jozwiak)  but most especially to the Garrett’s without whom none of this adventure would have been possible.  Thank you, thank you thank you from the bottom of our hearts!!!