'Toobing'

So, it's hot (for a change). What can you do? A bunch of us from work, plus some freinds from Perth (Oz) headed over to San Antonio for the weekend. We we staying in the swankey surroundings of the Sheraton Hotel, a couple of blocks from the 'Riverwalk', San Antonio's premier pub 'n restaurant district. If you're wondering why we chose the Sheraton, it was the cheapest hotel we could find at the last minute in the right part of town. And when I say cheap, it was still pretty damn expensive. However, it was 'right nice'.

We spent the Friday night busy eating and drinking, ending up at 2am in an Irish pub, which was selling passable Guiness. Drinking was accompanied by a plausible Irish 'Piano Man', who was playing requests. It were right good too.

After a stumble along the riverwalk back to the hotel, and an all to brief time in bed, we departed for the Guadalupe River near New Braunfels. It was packed out, with thousands of cars parked along the river in all directions. You almost couldn't see the river for the hundreds of 'toobers'.

I should take a step to the side at this point and explain to you the concept of 'toobing'. What the Texans really mean is 'Tubing', where you get hold of a big inner tube for each person, (the posher ones have a plastic 'base'), another tube for the cooler which is filled with beer and ice, and take the shuttle bus upstream. The bus is always a broken down ex-army or ex-school bus with missing windows and taped up seats, driven at 90 mph by a man called Three-fingered Dave (presumably his father had three fingers too?). Behind you in a wireframe trailer are the tubes and your beer, merrily bouncing around.

Anyway, now we know what 'toobing' is, we can get on the river. This we did, with Troy and I tying ourselves to the beer cooler (don't want to lose that), while the girls were left to drift wherever they wanted.

After that, things got hard work very quickly. It became apparant that you had to make a real effort to lean over to get another beer out of the cooler. Also, we had to plan carefully our route, which surprisingly coincided with the route that the river was taking. Occaisionally there were some rapids to contend with, but in the main it was a slow float downstream, watching the locals (mainly the college crowd) kill time, and plan on a good BBQ stop.

After an hour, we came upon a live band by the side of the river - the deal - 'Tits for Tips' which was printed on a large sign, stuck to their impromptu stage. Quite. :-)

Further on, we stopped for a BBQ Texas-style. These BBQs are a little different to ours - generally very slow cooked meat in many marinades, giving a stunning result. They'll turn these into sandwiches for about 5 bucks, piled high with jalepenos and sauce. Coupled with some margharitas, these went down a treat.

So, you get the idea. Great day. 4 hours on the river, 19 calories burnt, 4000 calories consumed, and that's before the evening meal...

Hell Yeah...

posted by Sam @ 16:28