Can You Guess What We Were Doing?

It was warm, but rainy. In fact, rain pelted our car during the hour-long drive to the launch site, making us question the wisdom of our plan. But we were determined to go anyway. It might be raining, but we were wearing bathing suits. Also, more importantly, we had sitters. My little sister and her husband had driven in from Nashville to visit and we were stoked to have some rare time together sans children.

We got to the departure point. It was time. My husband was first to go in. His voice shot up two octaves when his Teva-clad foot hit the frigid water. “Whoooo!” The rest of us laughed and kind of looked at each other — knowing we were next. There was a lot more laughing as we got in the water one-by-one. Ironically, we were all trying to stay as dry as possible, even though we were in water (and wearing bathing suits).

Then we were off. All doubts about the weather receded with the adventure begun. There was no turning back now.

It’s August, but my tush was like ice in the 68º water. I lifted up one of my over-sized loaner Keds and water ran out of the heel of my shoe and down the back of my leg, making me shiver. I had borrowed some “old” shoes from my mom, so I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my newer Nikes. (My mother is Type A, so her “old” shoes are actually sparkly white. That and the fact that there was an inch of space between my toe and the tip of the shoe made them look super sexy at the end of my stumpy legs.)

It was an odd sort of work out. We used our abs to hold our butts up and our arms and hands to navigate the water. I was trying to get over near my husband when he chided me with “Put some finger into it!” That made me snort and bust out laughing with this  dumb repetitive laugh I can’t help but do. The harder I tried not to laugh that way, the more I did.

The lack of control was exciting and made for funny situations. “Crap! A tree!” I ducked as best I could to thread the needle of branches I unintentionally entered. “I’m in a death spiral!” shouted my husband, laughing. Then we decided to link up and try to wait for my sister and her husband to catch up to us. We actually held on to a tree to wait for them.

Then I tried to play a trick on my husband, I got a hold of the tree (which was full of rain drops) and shook it. Problem with that is I was the one under the leaves that were moving, so I managed to just dump a bunch of cold water on myself much to my husband’s delight. Well, I guess I deserved it, but it would have been damn funny if it had worked.

The sun came out as we reached the end of our ride (of course), but we didn’t care. About the time we saw the sun, we also saw the head of a snake moving across the water near my sister. I wish I had a video of her reaction when I pointed it out to her. Her arms paddled so fast, she was practically skimming the top of the water to get away.  Ahhh, good times.

We laughed a lot and decided to make this an annual event. So, what did we do??? And if you can guess, have you done it lately? Man it was fun!

0 Responses to Can You Guess What We Were Doing?

  1. Jennifer August 23, 2010 at 12:27 pm #

    You were tubing down the river!! Man, I haven’t done that forever! Did you take an extra tube to carry the cooler full of drinks??

  2. Margaret Slattery August 27, 2010 at 7:41 pm #

    I want to to tubing with the kids when they’re all old enough. What’s the minimum age requirement?

    • heatherteen August 28, 2010 at 10:31 am #

      No idea. We didn’t take the kids, so I didn’t ask. They do have tubes with an enclosed bottom on them for kids (or coolers). We got into a couple of tricky situations, nothing dangeous, but we agreed it probably would have freaked our oldest (almost 6) out. A few more years for us, but we will definitely be doing taking the kids at some point.

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