About a month ago, we made plans to go tubing down the Guadalupe River with Keith and Sarah.  If you don’t tube down the Guadalupe at least once during the summer, it’s not really summer.  Or at least it feels that way to me.

We almost canceled because of Dave’s job situation but at the last minute decided to go anyway.  It it always a good idea to choose tubing down the Guadalupe over any other options you might have.  Because when you’re laying on your back in a tube floating lazily down a river with a cooler full of beer next to you it’s hard to imagine anything being wrong in the world. Even when you just bought a Sony digitial camera and underwater housing and lose it within your first 5 minutes of being in the river and spend the next 30 minutes searching for it to no avail.  Even when that happens in 2005 and you have to buy a new one before your trip to Miami in a week, you can still have a good time tubing down the Guadalupe.  Trust me.

And it’s June so the weather is boiling (already 80 when you wake up for work at 6am), but the Guadalupe is a cool 65 degrees.  That sounds cold - and it is - but that’s why it works.  There are very few naturally cool places in Texas in the summer and when you’re trying to get your booty into the freezing cold Guadalupe River, you DON’T EVEN NOTICE that’s it’s 110 degrees in the shade.

It was Sarah’s first time to tube down the Guadalupe and Dave went tubing for the first time last summer, only down the Comal (it feeds into the Guadalupe and is 5 degrees warmer).  We brought a few snacks: chips, sandwiches, etc.  Keith of course brought salami, olives, goat cheese and ciabatta.  (Keith said he’d wager any amount of money that we were the only group on the river snacking on goat cheese.)  And of course beer.  Only cans are allowed on the river, so we brought Corona and Tecate.  Under normal circumstances, Dave and I will go through a six pack in about a week, maybe 2.  On the river, we’ll go through 2 six packs in 3 hours.

There’s something about the combination of cold water, hot sun, and floating that makes me drink beer a million times faster than my normal pace.  (Seriously, ask anyone.  I don’t care at what temperature a beer is served to me because by the time I finish it, it will be room temperature anyway.)

Anyway, on this trip we floated near a father with his 2 kids, a boy of about 10 and a girl of about 8.  The 2 kids had water guns and the dad borrowed his daughter’s to shoot his son, who was on the other side of us.  The dad thought that since he was near “civilians” the son wouldn’t shoot back.  Right.  So we were caught in some (cold) crossfire for a while, but we weren’t upset.  If we didn’t want to get wet, we had no business being on the river.

We watched and laughed for a while and then I turned to look at the daughter, who had her water uzzi back and pointed at my face.  I thought she was joking, so I laughed, if a bit nervously.  But she didn’t waver.  She looked me dead in the eye and said, “No one will ever know about this.”

I turned my face and she sprayed water at my head while I heard her dad wrestling the gun away from her and saying, “Have you lost your mind?  We don’t know them!”

As they floated away the dad apologized, but I said it was okay, and that I was going to blog about it.

Jen- 1, Little Girl Who Watches Too Much TV? 0.