Addendum:  I don’t know how, but I forgot to thank Rose for sacrificing her waterproof camera to get the shots in this blogs.  Thanks for showing all the fun.  It was worth the camera getting waterlogged!

Sunday was another slow day.  Rich and I went out to get breakfast burritos from Bill Miller’s BBQ.  Rose swore these were the best burritos around.  They were pretty good.  I felt old while we were there.  Everyone was saying, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am”.  Why can’t my son be this polite?

After breakfast, we made ready to go tubing.  Rose picked out a place where we could get on the river in style and float the afternoon away.  I drove up to Don’ Fish Camp.  Wait, fish camp?  I thought we were going tubing?  Turns out they do their biggest business with tubing.  Driving in, we noticed that we were spelling it wrong all this time.  The correct spelling is apparently toobing.  Who knew?  We got parked, paid for our admission, and boarded the converted school bus for the ride down to the river.

The bus takes you up river a ways and then you float back down to where you left your car.  We got four inner tubes and managed to tie ourselves together.  We only had string to tie ourselves in a row.  It worked pretty well.  Rose had loaded a small cooler with drinks.  There was alcohol for Rose and Rich.  Lily and I made due with some non-alcoholic beverages.

The river here was pretty quiet, but the current was moving pretty well.  We were making good time and getting used to the way we had to navigate to get through the obstacles.  The sun was shining and the day was great.  We meet some interesting people along the way.

At the first set of rapids, we quickly learned to raise our butts out of the water.  This kept us for hitting rocks as we went.  After that, the battle cry was, “Butts up.”  We navigated the calms, the hidden rocks and trees, as well as the banks of the river where you would get thrown into very quickly.

The wildlife wasn’t limited to the turtles on the logs where they sunned themselves.  There were lots of young kids with coolers and loud music.  Why would you play gangsta rap on the river?  It was pretty disgusting lyrics, too.  Rose just told Lily, “Never repeat any of those words where I can hear you.”

We talked to one guy who seemed to have lost his group.  He was a student up in Austin.  He said his major was Therapy.  We were worried about it being psychiatrics and he had heard too much from us.  Turned out, he was going to do his Masters at the University of Washington.  How cool that it was a state where Rose was from.

Turned out, his buddies were on the beach ahead of us.  It was his friend’s, Sam, birthday.  He asked us to yell happy birthday.  We did and pretty loud.  They all stopped to wave.  Then they went right back to doing shotgun with their beers.  Rich is banned from helping anyone do shotgun anymore.  He’s good at it, maybe too good.

We continued on around the river.  At one point, we hit rapids and threw Rich onto a rock.  His tube broken away from the pack.  We had to chase him down and get connected again.  We continued on again and found a place where people were hanging out on some rocks.  We pulled up on the rocks and took a break.  Lily was sliding down the small rapids there.

A guy was training his black labs to fetch.  The dogs were so excited to jump into the water and get the toy.  He was doing it one at time and the poor dog left behind was beside himself for not going after the toy.  At the end, the guy lined them up and threw the toy.  Then he yelled, “Everyone.”  Off they both went to get the toy.

Rose had noticed all of the trash along the river as we went.  She wondered why no one did a clean up day to pick it up.  She has a good idea.  Left people take nets down the river and gather it up as they go.  For every so many bags you bring back, you would get so much off of your next trip.  It would be incentive to pick up and clean up.  We ran into a couple dredging the bottom for cans and bottles and trash.  They had several large construction bags with trash already.  Rose talked to them for a bit about their efforts.

We continued on down the river.  There were more rapids, calms, and fast moving currents as we went.  We ran into all kinds of people.  We had some laughs with some and shook our heads at others.  We finally came to the end and turned out tubes over the guy collecting them.

We decided that Rose needs a MoBag for her tubing trips.  It would have things like a waterproof bag for her camera, large carbines to connect the tubes together without the need for rope, sunscreen, coozies, and maybe some other things.  Maybe a good gift.  Hmmm.

We headed back to the house.  Decided that we were definitely hungry.  We started out for Whattaburger and changed our minds to head to Taco Cabana.  We got a bunch of foods and then to the house for dinner.  We had our fill with what we had gotten.  Unfortunately, we got shorted a couple of tacos.  But we ended up with enough to fill us.

Now I’m getting caught up on my blogs for the last couple of days.  It’s trying its very best to rain outside.  The temperature is coming down a bit.  The car said it was 106, but Rose’s iPhone said it was only 95.  It was definitely hot.

Rich got a little toasty crisp around some of his edges.  The tops of his legs are burnt.  My face is very red, but it doesn’t seem to hurt much.  There will be lots of lotion going on both of us tonight.  Found some stuff with Lidocaine since you can’t get anything very strong without a prescription.  It’ll fade in a couple of days.

Tomorrow, we start the trek back home.  Since our experiences through the OK state weren’t that good, we are opting to head up 35 and into Iowa and then over to home.  We know most of that way and it should be a good trip.  Sorry to go, but it will be good to home again.  I miss my Sascha.  Oh yeah, and Rick, too.