Another early morning awakening and another beautiful sunrise.

After a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and muffins,  with lots of coffee we drove a short distance to the Ocoee River to go white water rafting.

On arrival we all had to don wetsuits which were not the most flattering!

Ryan, one of the guides, then gave us a safety briefing which was pretty humorous but also quite scary.

After putting on splash jackets and helmets and picking up our paddles we drove down to the start of the 6 mile white water rafting course.

The Ocoee River is 37 miles long and the word ocoee means apricot on Cherokee as there are lots of wild apricot vines in the area. There are 3 hydroelectric dams that control the river and the white water rafting course starts at dam 2.

The Upper Ocoee River is made up of part natural stream bed and part man made whitewater course.  The man made section of river bed is one of a kind and was built for the canoe and kayak events in the 1996 Olympics. It is the only white water course built into a natural stream.

Part of the time the white water rafting section is drained and the water diverted via the powerhouse to produce electricity before being released back into the river.

In our raft we had Mark, Jim, Ali, Sherrien, myself and our guide was Acacia.

As soon as we entered the water we had a grade 3 section. The course is made up.of several grade 2 and 3 sections and also three grade 4 parts.

At one point you could jump into the river and just float which was amazing. We practised our rescue techniques getting back into the raft.

Around 90 minutes later we came to the end of the course. It was brilliant and luckily nobody went overboard.

We got the bus back to the wildwater rafting centre where we all had a nice hot shower and put on some dry clothes.

We then hopped back in our bus and drove a short distance to the Cherokee National Forest. We hiked a short distance to the Benton Falls.

By this time it was around 130pm so we stopped for some lunch.

The waterfall was beautiful and Sid, Steve and Nod went for a dip.

After lunch we scrambled up the mountain a bit further to another waterfall which was also stunning.

After our hike we headed home via the supermarket. Mandy and I were in charge of dinner and we made 3 chillies – veggie, mild and hot.

It all tasted really delicious and following dinner we had a bit of a party including a dip in the hot tub.

It was the early hours of the morning before we went to bed.