July 11, 2022

Lily and Esme spent the night last night and after pancakes, we went over to Melissa’s. We decided to spend a little more time at the pool before lunch. I had a visit from Nubby when we first got there.

We had lunch and I convinced Melissa to try tubing the river we parked the camper at with the kids. I told her it would probably take about an hour or two to go the 3.7 miles from the boat launch above our campsite to our campsite (hint in the title–I was wrong). Mary had to work at 7:30 so my plan went something like this:

2:30pm Get in the river (actually it was more like 3:30–the floaties took longer to blow up than I thought)

3:30 or 4:30pm Get out of the river (actually got out at 7:oopm)

5:00pm Dinner and games before Mary had to work.

Melissa and I went to Walmart and bought floaties for $4.88 each. We got everyone to the upper boat launch, leaving one car at the campsite, put on sunscreen and life jackets and hopped in. So far, so good!

Nova was a little stressed at first. I had her in a smaller tube but she was scared and cold so I put her on my lap instead and she was better. A little later, she went back into the small tube so I could navigate and she said “I’m okay with it now”.

We made a big circle with everyone and played a game of telephone. We had brought rope and scissors with and bungees to tie people together. The rope worked best because it stayed on no matter what. I’m glad we brought it along (even thought we almost lost the spool a couple of times) because sometimes we had to change configurations.

After we had been on the river about an hour and half, I used my phone to check our location. Oddly, we were only about 1/3 of the way. We did some math and, uh-oh!, Mary might actually be late to work at this rate!

Eventually, Joe and Mary left the group to paddle ahead so she wouldn’t be late to work. The boys went ahead a bit too, leaving Melissa and me in the back with the 4 little girls. There was a fast moving shallow part that got a little rough, made worse by the fact that Melissa and Lily were barefoot after they took their slip-ons off because they kept falling off. There were big rocks in the water we had to climb over and after we got through, there were tears shed by a couple of the girls. Katy was really cold so she sat on Melissa’s lap for a while to warm up. The mood was low among our small group though. Melissa and I worked together to distract everyone with singing songs, toilet humor, and cloud gazing. What shapes do you see in the clouds?

We saw a family of ducks. We also saw a blue heron really close up when it flew off of a log nearby.

We eventually made it back to the campsite. Joe pulled up a couple of minutes later. He took us to get the other vehicles and then took Mary to work. She was only a few minutes late. Unfortunately, I over-estimated the ability of my phone’s water resistance and it was damaged in the river. It was still working enough for me to upload my photos to the cloud and then it went kaput. At least it was the last full day of our trip. I have a service plan so I will get it repaired or replaced through that.

We ate dinner at the camper and went back to Melissa’s for a little while to play games before visiting Mary at work.

Joey, Cal and Asa came back to the camper to sleep.

In the morning we had breakfast, packed up the camper, and switched kids back. We got on the road at 10am and made it home to Pewaukee at 6pm. Everyone was happy to be home and to see Nole and our pets.