oh hai!: i'm on a boat

Last weekend, we trekked up to Sacramento to visit our buddies, Ginni, Ryan and Greg to go tubin' down the American River. The last adventure the five of us embarked upon ended with everyone dressed in toilet paper hats/wigs and clothes, sooooo...

We met the crew around 9:30pm on Friday at Tapa the World , a rad-ish tapas bar in downtown Sac. The area was odd, one block would have lots of old cute homes, then there'd be a block o' ghetto, then a block of solely shops and one of just restuarants...um, okay. At TtW, we were warmly greeted by the third or fourth pitcher of sangria (I forgot to mention the two-hour drive from S-vale to Sacto) and a table littered with tapas of all sorts. We heard that an order of paella had been put in roughly 45 minutes before our arrival, yet hadn't hit the mesa yet.

Two more pitchers and a few tapas later, no paella. After discussing it with our waitress (again), we were assured that it would 'be right out'. Twenty more minutes, no paella. Seriously?! Fiiiiiiiinally, 45 minutes later - and roughly two full hours after it was ordered - the wrong kind of paella joined our party, and was whisked away to have sausage and shrimps (and spit, we're certain) added to it. Further schmoooozing (a.k.a. complaining that a 40-minute dish took three times that long) got us a free pitcher of sangria. Semi-win. The true win with the bill. Five or six pitchers of sangria + $40 dish of paella + umpteen tapas = $102. Win? Yup. A super-win. It could also be referred to as a "lets pay the bill before they notice its wrong and get the hell outta here" win.

A rowdy game of Apples to Apples washed down with Bud Light followed dinner before we hit the hay in preparation for a rough day of sitting in tubes...

Now, in all of my "lets go to the river/delta/lake/sea experience", I've never ever ever hit the road later than 8am. This trip was different. We wandered to breakfast around 10:30am and lingered with Gin & Ryan's rad friends, Dave, Jackie and baby Carter, headed to the store and moseyed to the river with our deflated tubes. We had terrific intentions of blowing up all four tow-behind-a-boat type tubes, the floaty cooler and a one-man nerd-boat with those tire pumps from our cars' emergency kits. About three minutes into Operation Inflation, Boredom and Impatience crept in. A quick trip to the nearby River Rat store and $4/tube sent B & I on their way...

yes, that is a tube in the backseat...
your eyes do not decieve you, there are four tubes and a boat attached to a honda accord

Temps were pushing 100 degrees in the shade, and at last we touched gloriously chilly Sierra runoff close to 2pm...and I'll sum this up quickly by saying that:
A: floaty cooler inventors are my heroes.
B: canned beer floats, as we discovered after Rob took one for the team by toppling his tube to save our floating beer barge from certain puncturation (its a word) in a bank of trees, losing five beers in the process (note: all beers were retrieved and savored). Flip flops float faster than beer, however, and Greg's are now two wolfpacks of one.
C: the riffer draws some interesting folks - people smoking pot in the bushes, a girl-on-girl mud-wrestling match on a sand bar, lots of missing teeth...you get the point.
D: soggy buffulo wings suck (which G & R's pup, Emma, later discovered as well, when she pilfered them and stashed them all over the house). Regular chicken fingers/tenders from Safeway might be the most perfect food ever.
E: underwater cameras kind of suck above water. Two cameras yeilded seven or eight decent shots (read: clear enough to determine who is in the photo).
F: I cannot believe that I've lived in California my entire life and have never gone tubing. This needs to be a monthly (weekly?) thing.

the guy in the canoe at left was totally rockin' Metallica in his custom boat...so loud in fact that our initial attempts to befriend him were futile. finally though, we found out that he 'tinkers around with it a bit in his garage'...dude, how often are you out here?!