I took the day off yesterday. Well, I sort of took the day off. I didn't go to the office, but I did work at home from about 3 AM to 8 AM and a little bit off and on between 8:00 and 10:00. At 10:00, Scott and I packed up a cooler and headed west to a town named Sauk City. It was about a 45-minute drive from our home in Stoughton.
Speaking of packing up a cooler, here is what our cooler looked like upon opening.
Don't be fooled, though. Dig a little deeper and you would come up with this.
On a side note, I really like those wide-mouth aluminum bottles that some brands of beer, such as Miller Lite, come in these days. The beer in them seems colder.
Anyways, taking a cooler of beer is a necessity for tubing. I think nearly every person who tubes, parties along the way. It is such a part of the experience that places that rent tubes also rent special tubes for coolers. You tie the cooler tube to the tube you are floating on and off you go down the river. How cool is that?
Scott and I took a bit of a picnic lunch with us. The fat kids (us) thought we might get hungry along the way. We grabbed subs and some chips.
When we stopped to pick up food for lunch, we also went into Walgreen's to buy a disposable camera. I knew I would want to take pictures along the way but I was hesitant to take my digital camera. It's not water-proof and I didn't want to lose it if the tube tipped over for some reason. We did buy a water-proof disposable camera. I need to take it today to get the pictures developed. That kind of sucks. I would have preferred to have digital pictures. Knowing that when we were picking out the disposable camera, we saw this teeny-tiny digital camera. 10 bucks. For 10 bucks, we decided to try it. Here the little thing is. I put it next to a pack of standard size post-it notes to give you a reference point as to how small it is.
As you can see, it has a little lens you have to look out of to take the pictures. I can't remember when the last time was that I had to look out of a lens to take a picture. It also didn't have a viewing window, so we had no idea what the pictures we took with it would look like. We were sure, however, given the size, design and price that the pictures wouldn't be great quality. True dat.
OK. So now we have lunch and 2 cameras. We continued on to a little shop named WI River Outings in Sauk City. It's a little shack of a place right along the Wisconsin River. You can rent kayaks and canoes there. And, of course, tubes. Below is a picture of Scott in front of the place.
We had made reservations in advance. Another large party of people arrived about the same time we did. There were 8 of them and they were there for a tubing adventure as well. I got the feeling they were also party people. They were openly drinking beers as we were preparing to go. When one of the workers asked them if they wanted a bag to put their used cans in, they replied, "We probably need 2 of them." I wasn't mad at 'em.
After you check in at the shack, you board a bus and get transported a couple miles up river where you get dropped off and then you float down river in your tube. The bus pulls a trailer with the tubes, both the tubes for people (blue ones) and the tubes for coolers (yellow ones- can't really see them in the picture below but can in other pictures further down).
That was the last of the pictures I took with my digital camera. From here out will be pictures taken with the teeny-tiny digital without a viewing window.
When we arrived at the drop off point, we decided to let the large party of 8 take off down the river ahead of us. Here is Scott, beer in hand, waiting.
And off the party of 8 goes....
There they go down river....
Scott took a shot of me before we floated off. I had waded out a ways into the river.
It was an absolutely beautiful day. Mostly sunny. Fluffy clouds in the sky. Fairly mild temps (mid-80's) and a nice breeze blowing. Perfect tubing weather.
The scenery along the river was gorgeous. There are no words to describe how relaxing it is to float down the river on a beautiful day with the lovely Wisconsin scenery all around. A cold beer in hand just enhances the experience. I think the picture below of Scott about says it all. He is laid out on his tube, resting his feet on the cooler tube.
Scott was/is smart and thought ahead. He brought 2 straps. One to strap our tubes together so we wouldn't get too far apart and one for the cooler. The rental place provides a rope to tie the cooler tube to your own floating tube, but Scotty J. is more sophisticated than plain old rope. He's a strap man.
I barely got Scott in this picture (remember- no viewing window on the $10 mini-digital camera). You can kind of see the cooler tube floating along there with him.
My feet appear in a number of pictures I took. It was kind of hard to avoid them as I was taking pictures from a very relaxed and reclined position. If you aren't grossed out by feet, they actually add some perspective to the pictures. Here is what I saw as I was floating down river-- it shows the perspective from my vantage point. Picture quality sucks, which is unfortunate because the scenery was breathtaking.
Scott took a couple shots of me as I floated along a little ahead of him. It was so relaxing.
Here is one of me laid out. Chillin' like a villain.
Here is a grainy shot of the scenery. As you can see, the river is pretty wide but I don't think it's particularly deep.
There is a big sandbar along the route where you can stop, get out of your tube, swim, lay out, or do whatever you want to do. We didn't end up stopping but probably will the next time we go.
Somewhere between an hour-and-a-half and two-hours later, we were back to the shack. Here is Scott after he pulled our gear out of the water. We had actually floated a little past the stopping point and had to swim back upstream to get to the place. That wasn't any small task as there were a bit of rapids under that bridge you see to the left. I actually tipped over in my tube trying to get to where I could kick with my feet. We did a lot of paddling with our hands/arms, too. I can feel it in my shoulders today. Eventually we made it back to where we needed to be. My big, strong, ex-Navy man husband made sure of it. He wasn't about to be out done by rapids or the current.
We dumped our gear in the yard at the shack (per instructions) and ended our adventure for the day.
In closing, I have to say that I love tubing. So fun. So relaxing. I love floating in water and this is just about the perfect way to do it. Scott and I plan to do it again before the summer is over and maybe even check out a few other tubing places in the state. I've heard tubing along the Apple River between Wisconsin and Minnesota is beautiful. Maybe we'll do that adventure next year.
If any of the pictures I took with the disposable camera turn out good, I may post a few more shots of our trip yesterday. I'll have to scan them, so the quality might not be great. But, I guess they couldn't be much worse than the grainy shots with the 10 dollar digital camera. We'll see. The quality of pictures is very, very secondary to how much fun we had on our tubing adventure. We can hardly wait until next time.
1 comment:
Clearly, life is good....
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