Tubing the Green River

Hmmm, so we went tubing today. It was.....interesting, to say the least. The Green River doesn't have a descriptive name. If it did have a descriptive name it would be the Red Murky River. Maybe Mr. Green found the river and named it after himself.

The general idea, upon getting to the outpost, was to pay and put your tube on the trailer. Then you got on the short bus attached to this trailer for a ride upstream. I have to tell ya, most of these people were probably remembering riding a short bus to school at one time. Whew! I am even thinking that some of them were using this as their weekly bath. The girl by me smelled of BO, cigarette smoke and peanut butter. ICK! You could have grown a garden under her fingernails!!!! We felt as if we had crashed a redneck convention. Speaking of cigarettes, I think we were the only ones who did NOT have a ziplock bag with a pack inside.

Okay, enough of that. We get in the river. It is moving very slow. Except for Andy. Andy is half a mile downstream before we can blink. Then it got faster, we hit some rapids. Key gets tangled in some brush by the side of the river and flips off his tube. Then Key is underwater rapid riding. I snatch him up and into my tube. His tube is gone and so is his shoe. We'd just gotten started. Now I am very concerned about the blonde speck that is Andy! Somehow we all get back together and Robbie finds Key's tube. He is still scared and wants to remain in my lap. I convince him that me having numb legs will not benefit us in the least, so he gets off them and lets the blood circulate once again. Any rapid after this point send him into mild hysteria. At one point I am holding his tube with one hand and Andy's tube with the other. I cannot steer at all, of course. We got hung up on a rock and as I am scootching back and forth, back and forth Andy is saying, "WOW, look at that HUGE snake! He is HUGE! Mom, can you see him?!!!!" SCOOTCH SCOOTCH SCOOTCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think my arms are at least an inch longer than when we started. While holding onto both boys tubes we would get hung up on rocks and at one such impasse I think my elbows actually touched behind my back. I went over the rapid and they did not!

One funny moment was when Andy said, "Well, I've seen a bunch of turtles and that huge snake. Key keeps seeing lots of rabbits (rapids!) and I haven't seen any." He also said, after a particularly rough 'rabbit' that the first man to ever float down this river must not have wanted to live anymore. LOL

I did end up seeing one snake in the water with my own eyes so Andy might really have seen his too. I would have thought it was too cold for a snake but there he was!

So, anyway, that was our last-Saturday-before-school-starts adventure. Wanna go with us next time? :)