4th of July Paddle on Chatfield

You may remember that my wife (aka the SheppyBrew Beer Model) and I went Paddle Boarding with Juneteenth Paddle on Chatfield.

I mentioned in that post that we'd have to look into a new better pump than the one my wife has been using.

Well ... since then she had a birthday and I got her a bigger, more expensive, hopefully better pump, and we figured we would have to try it out to make sure it actually was better.

The first opportunity we had was July 4th.

So we packed up our paddling stuff, some beer, a lunch and headed down to Chatfield Reservoir. It being a holiday weekend, we went earlier than usual, which really paid off.

Thankfully, this new pump was SOOOOO much better!

The old pump would take forever, and usually I'd have to manually finish pumping up the wife's paddle board. It was also very hot, and didn't have a battery so we'd have to run a vehicle to power the pump.

This new one has a dual-stage pump that finished in 3 or 4 minutes (faster than I pumped up my paddle board).

It has a cooling fan, and doesn't get all that hot in that 4 minutes of pumping.

It does have a battery so we didn't have to plug in the pump to power it.

Best of all, I didn't have to manually finish her paddle board.

Success! It anyone wants our crappy old pump, I'll give it to you cheap (free).

I'm a little mad at myself for purchasing the crappy one, and waiting so long before looking into something better.

Anyway, we got on the lake early enough that it wasn't all that crowded yet.

And, as always, the scenery was beautiful.

And spending a couple hours on the lake was fun.

Since we were there earlier than usual, we didn't actually eat lunch on the lake.

There was storm clouds moving in as we headed back towards the parking lot.

But ... we made it back to shore before it hit.

We did get rained on carrying the boards from the lake back to the car, but it wasn't too bad.

Unfortunately, lots of people were leaving the same time as us. Luckily most of these people were not all that bright and all got into the right turn lane getting out of the park.

So, I was able to get in the left turn lane and save ourselves a good 20 to 30 minutes getting out by simply going the "wrong" way and turning around.

Don't tell anyone my "secret". 

We headed to our local brewery Locavore where we had our packed lunch.

What a fun day!

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