Tubing Adventures

My friend (and YW counselor) Natalie invited me to go tubing with her the other day. I hadn't been in a while, so I was excited to go. The crew consisted of Natalie, her sons Bryce (8) and Gage (5), Natalie's sister Stephanie, Stephanie's sons Connor (6th or 7th grade) and Tyler (freshman in HS), and me. (Mike would have come, but it was during the day and he had to work.) Sorry no pictures - I didn't want my camera to get wet.

Around noon, we drove down to Boone together and went to this very friendly place that loaned out tubes. We decided to haul them ourselves since we had 2 pickup trucks and it was a lot cheaper. However, the route they showed us was going to take about 4 hours to float. We thought that was a little long for a 5-year-old, so we decided to get off a little earlier than they showed us. We decided to park one of the trucks at a sooner point on the map so that we could get out a little faster and be able to drive back up to the truck at the start.

Unfortunately, there was construction all around the area that we tried to park in! We drove around for about 2 hours trying to find a way to park at the beginning and end of our shorter route! That's a long time for little kids to be patient, but they were great!

We finally found somewhere to park, and we got out to look and make sure we would be able to get out from that sandbar. It looked good, so we left one truck there and drove around to the top of the route. By this time, it was 2:30! We still had to find the top of the route, park, tie our tubes together, and get in!

We FINALLY got in the river around 3:00. The water was dirty but very warm - much different from the rivers in Utah. It was wide, slow, and lazy; the sun was overcast but the air was moist and warm. Basically, a perfect day to go tubing! We had a blast talking, laughing, floating, and swimming down the river.

When we finally got to "our" sandbar, we all had to jump out and wade in. During this process, we all got covered in sand. Poor Connor even lost one of his shoes in a sandbar! We wandered around looking for shells and having fun. Bryce and Gage were particularly fun to watch - they would get so excited every time they found a clam shell. They even found 3 live clams! The hunt for shells went on for about 45 minutes before we finally realized that we were on the wrong sandbar!

Luckily, we hadn't passed ours. All we had to do was hop back in our tubes and float for another 5 minutes to get to the right one. Poor Connor then had to hop back to the truck with one shoe missing!

At this point, it was already about 5:30. We still had to drive back to the top to get our other truck, drive back to the rental place to return the tubes, drive back to Farnhamville to Natalie's house, and I still had to drive back to Fort Dodge from there. I didn't get home until 9:30 at night! Definitely not how we planned it to go, but sure a lot of fun nonetheless!