After having lived in the Atlanta area for a couple of years now, I can testify to how brutal the summer months can be here. The heat and humidity are just miserable most days, and those that are not are generally filled with patches of thunderstorms and rain. The best place to be this time of the year is in the water and today, I'm doing just that. I'm joining a meetup group in northern Georgia for a tubin' good time as we float a couple of miles down the Cartecay River near Elijay, GA. Before moving here, I had purchased a new innertube just for this purpose, but didn't get to use it before leaving Reno. Today, I'll fix that.
Meeting up with the large group, we park our cars and I fill up with an air-compressor they brought along. Once we're all aired up, we head to the booth to pay our shuttle fee and then proceed to the pale green river water. The water is fairly warm, which is to be expected in mid-August, but it's still cooler than the air and once I'm sitting in my tube floating, I'm so relaxed, I nearly fall asleep. The river is mostly slow-flowing and shallow here, but there are a few places with mild rapids and of course large boulders just under the surface. I've never been tubing where I didn't end up sore rump from hitting those boulders.
The thirty of so of us in the group try our best to stay together, but inevitably, we drift apart at times, only to reconvene somewhere further down the river a short time later. I have lots of good conversations with these folks as we make our way to the shuttle point. Once we arrive, the shuttle driver helps us out of the river and we deflate and load up into an old van that looks like it was rescued from the 60's. It's fun though. We floated about 1.7 miles over the course of an hour-and-a-half or so. It was incredibly relaxing and now, we're headed to a nearby brewery to continue the lazy Saturday.
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