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TA-TA-TA-TOOBIN!
Tuesday, May 27th, 2003 @ 11:30 am | Posted By glitch13

Well, gaggle of us toobin' on Memorial Day to celebrate yet another birthday. For the uninitiated, toobing is the art of placing your posterior into an inflated tire innertube, placing an icechest into another one, placing many beers into your digestive tract, and lazily floating down a polluted and treebranch strewn river or creek. Its usually as fun as a bucket of fun things. Usually....

We got there around 1pm, jumped on in, got a few beers up in us and noticed the sky beginning to darken. Thirty minutes later, it was kind of grey and a horribly chilly wind was upon us. Thirty more minutes later, we were pretty much toobing in what seemed to be a non-stop deluge of rain the likes of which I had never seen before.

When the realization hit us that it was not going to let up for a while, we headed for a nearby "shore" (and by "shore" I mean a pile of sand, sharp pebbles and a host of bugs and pointy plants) where we noticed a couple other groups of people running to for some sort of shelter. Of course, there wasn't any, but you take what you can get.

So, there we are, about 20 people, just stading there in a downpour of biblical proportions (you know, that kind of rain that actually hurts when it hits you), freezing our genitals off, miserable as all hell. After about thirty minutes, I noticed a group of people hovering around one of their friends, then they laid this person on an innertoob on the ground, covered them up with as much craps as they could find, and all huddled around them. Shortly after that, a couple guys ran off in what looked liked "going to get help" mode. Apparently something really Not Good happened, and I really Did Not want to be involved in it. So, about another half hour later, we took off the second it let up a bit to try to get it all over with as quickly as possible, and to put as much distance between us and the greek tragedy that was playing itself out on the shore. I say "let up a bit" because for the remainder of the lesuirely stroll down the river it never once actually stopped raining.

When we finally finished this cavalcade of horrors about three hours later, we heard that the person back there on the shore had gotten hypothermia, so I'm guessing they got picked up at some point. Gee, what fun.

It may be a long time before I can drop my ass in a tube again and enjoy it. The scars from this trip run deep and wide, but I'm sure I'll work through it ... one day at a time.