Tejas, Vol. V
Our last 24 hours in The Lone Star State would prove to be a lot like the delicious burritos that we enjoyed in the East Austin restaurant, Juan In A Million; they were as memorable as they were densely packed.
After shooting up a storm at Red’s, we drove an hour SW of Austin to New Braunfells to indulge in that most leisurely of watersports: river tubing. This is where you lie in an inner tube, and let the natural current of the river carry you to a point downstream – in our case, a point about 5km’s further down the Guadalupe River – all the while taking in both the splendour of your natural surroundings, and inexpensive beer. Note: you can’t really drink expensive imported beer while you tube – the inherent pretentiousness of drinking imported beer totally flies in the face of the purity and simplicity of the sport tubing. And yeah, I would definitely term it a sport, because in between the long periods of relaxed, serene flotation, you occasionally need to dispense with a concentrated burst of frantic paddling in order to be properly positioned to flow through the rapids. It’s not unlike curling in that regard, except you’re actually riding the slidey thing, and you’re not dressed like your 5th grade lesbian gym teacher.
We did it through a proper tube/rafting rental outfit, and they set us up with all the kit we needed, and some stuff didn’t (see below for examples), as well as lifts to and fro the pick-up and drop-off points. Unless you’re going with well-equipped locals, this is definitely the way to go.
Evan and Guy, logging in the hours, so you don't have to
Look closely at the low hanging branch, and you'll see some x-rated reptilian activity. You can't keep a good turtle down.
And what a way it was – especially after, about 30 minutes into our excursion, we floated up to a group of friendly, bikini-clad tubists (tubistas?), who were celebrating a birthday in their group, and had their own, makeshift floating fiesta in full swing, so we joined them for the remainder of the 3-hour float down the Guadalupe. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend one’s birthday than to lazily float down a river with your best mates and a few cold bevvies in tow. Texans really do have the important stuff figured out.
For your future reference, here is a list of what’s required for a successful tubing excursion:
- a river
- an inner tube
- bodyweight
- alcohol
And here’s a list of optional items that we saw fit to include on our trip:
- bathing suit
- waterproof camera
- sunscreen (you can opt out if you want to achieve that “local” look)
- baseball cap (preferably with camouflage pattern, or logo of your preferred, value-priced alcoholic beverage (bonus points if your hat contains both of these elements))
- resealable container of beef jerky
- beer coozy
- cooler & additional inner tube (for sealed beverage transportation and temperature optimization)
Optional items that we did without:
- inner tube insurance (the outfitters actually tried to sell me this)
- self respect (I actually thought we had brought this along, but I realized I was mistaken when all three of us decided to pee in our inner tubes, rather than do the slightly classier move of “abandoning ship” to relieve ourselves in the open water).
I feel like tubing really needed its own entry. It was that awesome. We’ll wrap up Texas properly tomorrow. Yeeee-haaw.
