are you down?

I had a fabulous weekend being outdoors and all wilderness-y for one of Nate's friend's, Meghan's, birthday! She and her husband live in Seattle and Nate ran into her one day at the mall (while he was working at Express) so now we are friends. Huzzah!

In any case, we ran into Matt (Meghan's husband) while we were eating lunch one day -- since we all work within a less-than-a-mile radius of eachother -- and he invited us on a surprise camping/tubing weekend for Meghan's birthday. It turned out to not be much of a surprise, but we still had fun.

Nate and I did discover, while we were packing on Friday night, that even though we managed to hold on to the tent, the poles and other tent paraphernalia seemed to have disappeared. We're guessing it was stolen when the car was broken into, because we kept the poles, rainfly, stakes, etc. in the actual tent bag. We didn't keep the tent in there because we couldn't get it to fit ever again. Oops.

In any case, it meant a quick stop at Target on Saturday morning after Matt and Meghan (so kindly) picked us up on the way to Ellensburg, WA. Of course, when I pulled the tent out to set it up, I was blind, because we thought they had jipped us the rainfly and we would have to go back to Target. Turns out it was underneath the tent the whole time. I just must not have seen it when I pulled the tent out of the bag. Hehe. Oops!

We arrived a little after 12:30 and staked out the campsite while we waited for more of Matt and Meghan's friends to arrive. The one we found was awesome -- big enough for everyone and it had access to the river. Once everyone arrived and got settled, we headed over to the tubing van, packed up seven tubes (plus a cooler tube) and a small inflatable dinghy-like raft for one person and our German Shepard mascot, Sabrina. (She was awesome and floated down the river like a champ. She also had this adorable doggy life-vest. It was great.)

Floating down the river was so freaking great - relaxing and hilarious, at the same time. We hooked all the rafts together so we wouldn't drive apart and we could pass our "refreshments" easily from the cooler tub. Nate wound up being the bartender. We also discovered that since the cooler tube was the heaviest, it worked well to steer us to the side of the river we needed to go. We also had frisbee paddles -- which worked surprisingly well -- to keep us from drifting into the "sweepers" (aka low-hanging branches) on the banks. We only hit the side a couple times. We also got stuck in a little pool on the lefthand side that had created a slow-moving eddy. It took us around in a circle before letting us back out into the regular current. (It was also at this point that Matt had jumped out of his tube to rescue a beer can from the river. When he tried to swim back, the current was to strong, and "swimming" meant "staying in place," so we had to direct ourselves back towards him so he could jump on again. This is really hilarious when you've been drinking.)


The guy who had dropped us off told us what to look for right before the exit to the river so that we could be sure to paddle over to the side. We were having so much fun that we contemplated continuing tubing down the next ten miles of the river, since the first one had only taken us two hours and there was plenty of daylight left. One major problem -- we were out of drinks! We had more back at the campsite, so we decided we'd jump out, restock and hop back in, no big deal. The current was moving pretty swiftly, and we missed the first exit we were supposed to take because it was kind of hidden around a bend. No problem, though! Our campsite backed up to the river, so we decided we'd just pull over and restock there.

We made our way all the way over to the side of the river and floated until we found the little path that led from our campsite to the river. We all hopped off the tubes and pulled them over to the side to get them up and out of the water enough so that a couple people could hold onto them while we grabbed more drinks.

What we didn't account for was how strong the current was just past the spot where the trail was, or how slippery the algae covered rocks were on the bottom of the river. And how, with the tubes all clipped together, if one went, they all went.

And that's exactly what happened. The current picked up the outer-most tubes and tugged at them so hard that the cooler tub unhooked, with two other tubes still attached. I lost my footing, went down, and was pulled along with them. Nate was still with the outer tubes, since we had been sitting on them, so he went with us -- until the two regular tubes unclipped from the cooler tube and carried him away. Don, one of the other guys who was with us, jumped after the cooler tube (and me,) but even with the two of us, the current was too strong and the rocks too slippery to gain good footing. We eventually made it to the side of the river, where there was enough of an opening for us to shove the cooler tube up on the bank and climb out beside it. Nate was just gone at this point, and we figured the water was too strong for us to go back in and make it up to the campsite, so we dragged the cooler tub into the brush to see if we could find a path out.

No such luck. We shoved our way through some brambles for a while, and got cut up and super dirty. We could hear the people back at the campsite, and we eventually could hear Nate through the brush, but we couldn't see anyone anywhere or find a clear path that didn't end in a thorny mess. The end result was to hop back in the river and stay as close to the bank as possible, using the branches on the side -- which were dead and snapped off in our hands, more often than not -- to pull ourselves back upriver to the campsite.

It was an ORDEAL.

Needless to say, we did not continue on down the river.

The rest of the weekend went off great, with the boys using very sharp knives (and a hatchet) to whittle sticks for hot dogs, an awesome campfire and seeing copious amounts of stars once the sun went down.

The weather was perfect -- warm in the sun, with a cool breeze and freezing water. You were never hot, but (unless you were actually in the water) you were never cold, either. I managed to get a good amount of freckles without getting burnt. And I wore my new bathing suit from Target:

(I do not look like that in it, unfortunately)

My sister says it looks like Malibu Barbie; we later amended that to Malibu Christie, since Barbie gets pink and Christie usually gets a non-pink bright color.

(apparently her name is now Nikki and they are no longer in Malibu, just simply at the beach. way to be PC, Mattel.)

I guess I could also be Beach Teresa.

Hah.

In any case, this weekend was awesome. We watched Despicable Me with my sister on Sunday night, which was cute, and tonight we're going to see Cowboys vs Aliens and have sushi. Yay!