Somewhere Down the Crazy River

I grew up in a town real close to the Kalamazoo river. I know right? What a statement, what an opener. We really don’t care too much about where I grew up. Cause let’s face it, growing up stories are boring and a little daft. But ya know, where I grew up is relevant to what I am going to be talking about after I few more blathering sentences.

Now bear with me, there will be a point to all of this. Not right now, but soon. Actually, I think I might be stalling because I don’t really want to get too wrapped up in this right now. I’m going to press on anyway.

Where were we? The river and where I grew up. Yeah, that stuff.

So, back to the beginning. I grew up near the Kalamazoo river. We had a spot where a bridge used to be, that we would hunt for crayfish at. You could find those little buggers in all sorts of places in the river back then. Heck, you might be able to do that now, but I haven’t gone crayfish hunting in far too many years.

We also used to tube or rubber raft on the river at times. I mean, you kinda gotta expect that right. Living near a river you expect a person to do all sorts of water activities in the water. Or maybe, you don’t have a river near you so you never did any of the river stuff when you were growing up. That’s actually kind of sad. Everyone needs a local river, especially if they don’t have a lake near by. I live in Michigan so we have access to all kinds of stuff like that.

Where was I? Oh yeah, growing up by the river. I might be beating this part of it to death. But to bring us back around, I want to mention that I have been tubing down other rivers as well. Some of them a bit more violent. Never did the white water rafting thing though. But I digress…

Just before we embarked. Silly me, I didn’t have a water proof cover for my phone to get pictures along the way.

Anyway, the make a short story long portion of this is coming to an end. And I am approaching the actual point of what I am doing here today.

So we circle back around to the beginning. And instead of talking about my time growing up and the kalamazoo river, I am going to take a few minutes to talk about the Saint Joe river.

After many, many years of not playing in a river, we did something a bit crazy this weekend. We went tubing down the Saint Joe river.

This ended up being a pretty long trip, something like 5 or 6 hours. Thankfully the water was at least a little warm too. After that many hours of moving at about 1 to 2 miles an hour, you don’t always end up with much to keep you warm. Mainly because everything is going to be wet as all heck.

In the end it was a good time. Granted I felt weird without my iPad or a book in my hands. But sometimes you have to enjoy nature for nature. Yeah, the 3D world is a bit too real sometimes.

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