I have a friend; I call her my Future Wife BFF. She’s amazing, and we tend to go on a lot of adventures together. We’ve road-tripped to Las Vegas, Texas, Iowa, South Dakota, spent the weekend on a yacht, and drove the entire Route 66 together.
Last week we decided to float down the river in tubes. She has the perfect setup: tubes with netting on the bottom so you don’t have to worry about any fish nibbling your tush, a tube for my cooler and all the other shit I tend to bring (unicorn floating speaker, bubble maker, extra bubble juice, sunscreen, all the things…..)
It was a beautiful day. Super hot and a perfect day for being on the water. We got in the river without incident. Started up Creed on the unicorn speaker and fired up the bubble machine:
My FWBFF is pretty smart; she brought a paddle so we could navigate ourselves around the downed trees and keep ourselves off the shoreline. We floated a good hour and then…..
Someone (stop looking at me) got the unicorn speaker stuck in a downed tree. The river was trying to pull us downstream; we were trying to rescue the unicorn. Her speaker fell out, but guess what? IT FLOATS! And it floated right to me. I grabbed it, and eventually we got the unicorn free. Unfortunately, we capsized the unicorn again, and we lost the speaker. Next time I’ll need to strap it in somehow.
We floated on for another hour, and FWBFF asks, “I wonder where we are?”
I didn’t wonder where we were. We were floating down the river. I probably made some smart-ass comment accordingly and laughed.
Thirty minutes later, FWBFF asks again, “I wonder where we are?”
There seemed to be a hint of panic in her voice, so I pulled up my phone and our location for her. I’m slightly puzzled, though, because FWBFF doesn’t tend to go into panic mode; that’s usually my job. I handed her my phone to show her where we were. She doesn’t seem relieved. I jokingly asked her if she had plans for later that night. She said she did. I said, “Oh. You might be late.” And I offered to paddle to get us down the river faster. We took turns with the paddle, trying to get to where we had parked my car at the landing. We paddled for another hour.
I took my phone out again so I could show her our progress. Uh. We didn’t have much progress. I asked her what landing we were supposed to get to, and I looked it up from our location. It was still ten miles away….by car. We’re on a winding river going 1-2 miles per hour….fuck. Now I started to realize why she was panicking. I started to panic too. We thought about just going over to the bank and getting out, but we had no idea if there were roads nearby. I called Nathan and asked him to look up where we were and help us with an exit plan. He said, according to my location on his phone, we were somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Sounded legit to me…
Then he said it looked like there was a clearing close by and we had to get to the shore asap. We paddled like crazy and made it to the shore.
Then we deflated the tubes so they would be easier to carry and dragged all our stuff up, as in I had to drag all the shit I brought with, up the riverbank. At the top of the bank was a steep ravine and a path that looked like it sorta followed the river. Which do we pick? Steep ravine or the path? We thought going up the ravine would be the best choice. Then we could see what was around us. So we hauled all our crap, again, mostly my crap, up the ravine. At the top of the ravine, the first thing I noticed was someone’s trail camp attached to a tree. I stuck my face in the camera and screamed,” WE NEED HELP! HELP US!” Then proceeded to laugh uncontrollably.
FWBFF spotted a deer blind and said we should be close to a house; let’s follow this path and see where it goes. So we did.
It went directly to a house. (She’s so smart.) We walked up from the back; we’re exhausted from being on the water for so many hours. She looks at me and asks if we’re just going to cut right through their yard. I say, “Fuck yeah we are.” So we did.
We got through their yard and dropped all our crap (again, mostly mine) under a tree at the end of their driveway. FWBFF called her husband to come pick us up. Then….The owners of the house came out. They looked concerned and confused. We started laughing and said, “Hi! Sorry we cut through your yard. We miscalculated our tube ride.” They seemed relieved we didn’t seem too crazy (they don’t know us), and we chitchatted for a bit. We assured them someone was coming to pick us up. And he did.
We did the calculations; it probably would’ve taken us NINE more hours to get to that landing…Thank goodness we got out when we did.
Midlife has never felt so good.
~Kimmie, XOXO
Leave a Reply