Family Fun

I’m not always the big fat meanie the wife and  knuckleheads would have you believe.  Every once in a while I like to try to organize fun-filled family adventures that, unfortunately, have a tendency to end up like a good ole fashioned Griswold Family Christmas.  For example, there is a river that runs from the mouth of the canyon for about 5 miles until it winds straight through our neighborhood.  Once I decided it would be fun to drive up to the canyon and float the river all they way back to our neighborhood in a raft and tubes.  On paper the plan was flawless.  However, the execution of said plan left a lot to be desired.

Unforeseen Item 1:  Upon hitting the water  I quickly realized that car tire tubes were not meant to keep a two  hundred and lakfdj;l pound man afloat.  My can was dragging through the sand and bouncing off rocks like nobody’s business.  It must be torture for dogs who have worms if dragging their butts down the sidewalk is preferred to dealing with the itch.

Unforeseen Item 2: I was truly surprised at how quickly different size kids on different size tubes scatter.  Not since I burst out of my front door in my underwear to scare away toilet papering neighborhood kids have I seen kids take off in so many different directions and at such different speeds.  Luckily there was a rope in the raft and I was able to tie everyone together and hold the rope while I walked the river.

Unforeseen Item 3:  Along the river there are lots of tree branches that hang across the river and plenty of places where the water was so deep I couldn’t touch the bottom of the river.  It took some tricky steering to maneuver under and through some of the branches and deep spots.

Unforeseen Item 4:  While attempting to navigate through some particularly low-hanging branches, Wally began to scream the most panicked scream in the history of panicked screams.  I looked to see him on the tube on his back staying as low as he could in order to get under the branch.  Three inches from his face was the biggest, scariest cat spider in the world.  Apparently they string their webs across the water all along the river to catch mosquitoes, as we saw hundreds of the spiders on our trip down the river. 

Unforeseen Item 5:  I had forgotten that G-Unit is a bee magnet.  No one is more terrified of bees than she is and nobody gets stung nearly as much as G-Unit.  Five minutes into the trip she was stung and spent the rest of the ride in the fetal position, sucking her thumb in the raft. 

Unforeseen Item 6:  We came around one corner to find a dead cat, incredibly bloated, floating in the river.  When I saw the open wound on its side I told the kids to just keep their mouths closed and not let any water in until we were a few hundred yards downstream (Yes, I do realize the cat germs would accompany us the rest of the way down the river). 

Unforeseen Item 7:   I thought we had safely made it to the home stretch when we passed under the bridge where the highway crosses the river.  Little did we know that a homeless man had made a camp under the bridge.  His campfire was still smoldering and his backpack was still there as we passed by.  My kids have never been so quiet in their entire lives.

Each one of the kids cried at least once during our adventure which verifies to me that the trip was a success.  A few months later we were driving down the road when Lunchmeat reminisced out of the blue, “remember when we floated down the haunted river?”