The truck and the boat. The first thing you need to know about my kind of river trip is that it's not "whitewater rafting." That boat you see on the trailer is my folks' dory, and it's rigid, made out of wood (though you can also make them out of aluminum, foam, or plastic). Those kinds of boats are more fun, more difficult to row, and especially if they're wood, extremely vulnerable to rocks. If a kayak is like a whitewater motorcycle, and a raft is your sensible Toyota Corolla, a dory would be a BMW. A bit pricey and silly, but well-built and a joy to operate. We also took a raft, which I rowed. Rafts (that is, inflatable boats) are easier to row, a bit cheaper, can bounce over rocks where a dory would get smashed, and can roll up into a smallish size. However, they're also sluggish, often leak, and with new techniques, are approaching parity with the cost of a dory. On the trip one of our friends had built himself a wooden dory from scratch in 2.5