So my bestie friend and I are always coming up with crazy great ideas of things to keep us and the kids busy. She had the off the wall great idea that we should all go tubing down the creek.
By all, I mean her, her husband and her 2 kids ages 3 and 9 and me, my husband and our 3 kids, ages 19, 13, and 8 and we usually have my sons girlfriend and his best friend and his girlfriend with us so that is a total of a dozen of us. My bestie called around until she found tractor inner tubes, which wasn't as easy as you think considering we live in rural Pa., but with a little persistence she found some for FREE!!!
So my husband, my bestie and I loaded up into her car and went to retrieve the tubes. We found a large tractor trailer full of huge tires and tubes. He started to dig and move things. It was over 100 degrees outside and he was sweating like crazy. We made the decision to run home and grab our son and his friend. They climbed into the trailer and in no time were completely as black as midnight from the grease.
We finally managed to wrestle 12 tubes from the trailer and we all felt victory. we began loading them into my bestie's jeep and realized there were no valve cores in any of them. So no tubing that day because everything was closed and there was no place to buy any. The reason the guy had said we could have the tubes for free was because we would have to go back to him to buy the cores. LOL! So almost $30 later we had cores. My husband put them in and began to blow up the tubes. My husband's air compressor kept kicking off every 2 minutes but he managed to get them blown up. All but 3 leaked. UGHHHH!!!! So off to Walmart to buy patches. He patched the tubes and blew them all up again to make sure they were not leaking. Success!!!!! So we planned on the spur of the moment decided to try our hand at this tubing thing. We packed all of the deflated tubes into the vehicles and 2 little kids and my son and his girlfriend and off we went. We got to the creek and started to use a car pump to inflate the tubes. It took half an hour to inflate one and we needed 6. UGHHHH!!! So once again we used our brilliant thinking caps to figure out what we could do. We decided to go to sheetz and use the machine to blow up the biggest of the tubes. We loaded them into the car and my bestie and me went to sheetz. Once we got there we waited in line for the air pump. The guy in front of us was taking forever. We finally got up to the pump and we raised the air pressure as high as it would go and the tube still wasn't filling. So I checked and there was no air coming out. The darn thing was broken and we couldn't get the tubes blown up.
By now we had been trying for hours to go tubing and it was almost dark. We decided to just forget it. I tried texting my son's girlfriend's phone and got a wrong number. UGHHH!!!! We returned to the creek and my husband had 3 of the tubes blown up and they were waiting for us. By now it was dark. We decided to let the kids just paddle around in the creek. My son and his girlfriend took the kids into the creek. It was dark so we pulled the vehicles up and shined the lights on the creek. Now don't worry the creek is not deep. The spot we were at was not past my son's knees. My husband left our Jeep running, but my bestie turned hers off and left her lights on. Now I know that by now many of you who know me know what I am going to say. You are all right, she went to turn her Jeep on and we heard that famous, click, click, click. Luckily my husband had jumper cables in our Jeep so he jumped us. Home we went. We didn't get the tubes blown up, but we did get the Jeep jumped. The day was not a total loss. The kids did get to paddle around. We also learned a very valuable lesson, blow the tubes up before we leave! We had our light bulb moment. So a few days later we decided to try again. This time it was my bestie and her 2 kiddos and my husband and I and our son and his friend. We blew up the tubes and jammed them into every available opening and on the roof. We used lots of rope and tied everything down. We got to the creek and unloaded everything. We drove one vehicle to the ending point and on the way there I see something fly past my window. My bestie had left her brand new pack of cigs on the hood and it had gone flying past the window. So on the way back from dropping the vehicle off we had a scavenger hunt for cigs. My husband walked along the road and we finally found them. Whewww!!!!! We put the tubes into the water and everyone climbed on. We had left all of the rope in the other vehicle so had to resort to a bungee strap to tie the littlest one to his mom. As many of my friends and readers know I was hit by a truck and have a bad knee so sometimes things like this are a challenge for me, but i was determined after all we had been through to get my butt wet. My husband rolled my tube down to the creek and then came back up the hill to help me walk down. I got to the creek and went to sit in my tube and fell right through the hole and landed plop right in the creek. I wasn't hurt, but I finally had gotten my butt wet. So we decided that the best way to handle it was for me to sit on one side and dangle my legs in the center. It worked. We leisurely floated down the creek, my butt sometimes scrapping on the rocks. I even got stuck on a rock and my hubby, who can't swim had to come to my rescue. We had so much fun. When it came time to get out of the creek we almost floated by our landing. Our son's had to swim out and drag us in. Everyone managed to get up the bank and we deflated the tubes, loaded them up and started on our way home. My husband and I had taken the roof off of Jeep so we could squeeze the tubes in. We were soaking wet and the sun was now down. We froze all the way home.
Once home I put on a sweat shirt and pulled the blanket of me and stayed covered up all night and it took forever to get warm. We are thinking about doing this again this weekend. Because we are crazy so full of adventure!
