Adopting Lazy as a Life Theme

I've avoided writing about any of my adventures of the past month partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I've been having difficulty knowing where to start from.  So we're gonna tell these stories in reverse, Memento style.  Today's installment:  Saturday tubing on the Shenandoah river.

The genesis of this trip came mostly from my guilty conscience.  As a nice treat for Memorial Day the week before tubing, I decided to hang my married friends out to dry.  I had planned to take a 3-day road trip of unknown destination with Dirty Harry and his wife, but the Wednesday night before our departure, I decided to scrap our plans to join the rest of Eastern Single Mormondom in the annual spawning run to Carolina's Outer Banks.  I knew I would need some decompression from that trip, not to mention some redemption.  So in hopes of cushioning the flakiness, I floated the tubing idea to Dirty Harry before I left.

Now, do you remember last summer's retreat to the Shenandoahs for the waterfalls?  The need to get out of the city and commune with nature.  Sometimes the need for Mother Nature is brought on by too much work and the humming vevuzela that is the city.  Other times, the need is brought on by too much vacation or a schedule packed too tightly with fun.  I can't be the only one to need a vacation from my vacation.  That's what this tubing trip was about.

So I invited a handful of folks, who in turn invited a few more.  We ended up with a pretty good group of about 14 to head out to Front Royal, VA.  There, we would float a three-mile stretch of the laziest river you've ever seen.  If Jeff Lebowski were a river, he'd be the Shenandoah.  It takes three-plus hours to float the three miles.  In that time, you relax.  You jabber about things that don't matter with people that do.  You forget your cares, your stress, your name, your nationality.  Your swimsuit, if you're into that.  You drink in the sunshine and any tasty beverages you may have tied to your tube.  Turning over on your tube without falling in is the only concern, and if you do fall in, the water's warm and inviting.  It's the perfect amount of time to relax without getting bored.  And afterward, you catch a great barbeque joint on the way out of town.

I made one poor decision on the day, and that was in my choice of dessert.  But I feel comfortable in knowing that it was a choice that I couldn't have avoided under any circumstance.  Even knowing then what I know now, the universe would have warped space-time to bring us together anyway.  So, in keeping with the lazy day, I laid back and rode the slow, easy current of fate as it carried me into the arms of a sundae called The Fat Elvis. When debating between a simple rasberry softserve dipped cone and a sundae called The Fat Elvis, there really was no debate, right?  Right.  That sundae really tied the day together, man.