I found this to be quite hilarious and I’m going to go out on a limb by posting it in the hopes that I am not scaring off any future river rats! FYI, the passengers who created this, did so in good humor and immensely enjoyed their Colorado River Trip!
-Lindsay

Ten Best Ways to Prepare for a Rafting Trip

• One week before the trip, have a yard of sand delivered to your home.  Sprinkle liberally in your bed, dresser drawers, on kitchen and bathroom counters.  Fill your salt shaker, sugar bowl and cereal boxes with sand and use them as usual.  Place garbage can lids of sand in front of your fans and run them continuously at maximum speed.
• After renting a projection TV, illuminate the walls and ceiling of your bedroom with old Dracula movies, especially the snake, spider, lizard and bat infested scenes.
• Have your friends form a long line.  Then systematically pass the entire contents of your home out of the front and into the back door of your house.
• With an industrial size brush and a bottle of bleach, wash, rinse and sterilize the hubcaps of your car thirty minutes after sunrise and immediately after sunset every day for eight days.
• With a large meat tenderizer, practice beating beer cans down to the diameter of a hockey puck.
• Sit on the hood of your car while riding through the car wash.
• Line your sandals with sandpaper and spend two hours per day on a StairMaster.
• Drape the allotted contents of your brown grocery bag on the bushes and rocks in your back yard.  Twice a day practice changing while your neighbors watch.
• With twenty-seven friends standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool, practice looking nonchalant as you carry on a conversation and pee simultaneously.
• Crap in your upstairs waste paper basket, then, with your pants still around your ankles, run downstairs and pee in the tub.
  

Other helpful hints:

• Keep putting out cans of kippers and oil soaked sardines until someone finally eats them.  This will usually take around six to seven days.
• Hand out free beer to anyone that can Eskimo Roll a kayak and looks as if they will rob your house during your eight day rafting trip.
• Put liberal quantities of “Gun Slinger” hot sauce on everything you eat.  Practice saying “I love this stuff” without your eyes tearing and your nose running.
• Always answer “yes” to the question “Do you see any rocks?”
• Always answer “no” to the question “Does anyone want to go on a power hike?”

Sent in by River Guide Tim Whitney, who got it from Roxanne Denoyer at Grand Canyon Expeditions, whose passengers created it.

Printed in Volume 10 #3 (Summer 1997) of the Boatman’s Quarterly Review