After a not so hot start to our trip on Friday night (it rained which made for a long tense drive) we woke up to a beautiful, clear, sunny day in Charlottesville. We couldn't have asked for a better day to go tubing on the river. We set out for James River Runners, a river-adventure company located about 30 minutes outside of Charlottesville for our trip. The whole thing is very laid back and casual. The website for James River Runners makes it sound all serious, and dangerous. Especially all the warnings of "NO ALCOHOL...the river and alcohol do NOT mix". Um, ok. Seriously, every single person we encountered had a cooler full of beer. And that river? So calm and peaceful. Its a lot wider than I expected, and crystal clear. You can sit in your tube and see all of the rocks and the fish and stuff all the way to the bottom.
Anyway, we got checked in and taken upstream on a rickety old school bus on some pretty scary twisted little one lane roads (yeah, I had flashbacks of Panama). We got to the site, and they handed out our tubes including their high-tech version of "cooler tubes" that you can rent for 8 dollars a day (inner tube with 2 ropes tied across to form an "X" on the bottom of the tube to hold the cooler secure...but you know, it totally works fine). We got in, and set off on our way, floating downstream back to the adventure company. The whole tubing event took 4 hours. You could probably do it in a shorter amount of time, but we stopped several times to just hang out and enjoy the scenery. We had a cooler full of beer, fried chicken, cherries, and sprite melon slices (it was my first taste of a sprite melon, but OMG, it was delicious. If you can find one in your area, try it. Amazing). The river was deep enough to be over our heads in some places, and shallow enough in others that we all had to do the attractive "butt-lifting" move to keep our cheeks from scraping the rocks. Most of it was just nice, comfortable waist-deep water, just cool enough to be refreshing.
I just can't tell you how relaxing it was. The three of us laid back in our tubes, in a circle with our feet propped up on the cooler tube, sipping beer, and having the best day ever. I would definitely go on another tubing trip.
After we recovered from that, we went out shopping to buy replacement sunglasses. Erica lost her favorite pair on the river, but not until the very end, so it wasn't too overly inconvenient. And afterwards, we headed to the downtown mall to walk around, browse a bit and have dinner. I love the mall there, its an outdoor area full of street performers, kiosks with handmade jewelry and crafts, lots of funky little artsy shops, and plenty of bars and restaurants. We were still feeling a little full from all the chicken we ate on the river, so we ended up at one of my favorite little diners there called "The Nook". Nothing fancy, but the food is good.
They used to have the best sweet potato fries in the whole world, but unfortunately those weren't on the new menu (they have just remodeled and changed things up a little bit), but everything was still delicious.
Oh, and I am about to leave out one of the best parts of the day....Bruce's birthday cake. Erica got it from a local bakery called "Hot Cakes", and good sweet Jesus, it was amazing. It was a carrot cake (and I am not overly fond of carrot cakes usually). It had 3 layers of cake with a 2 thick layers of what was literally cheesecake in between. And a cream cheese frosting that was to die for. It made me rethink my carrot cake opinions, because I fell in love at first bite. Its a damn good thing we don't have a Hot Cakes bakery here in Greenville....
And that was our first day. We crammed in a whole lot of fun into it, and we were exhausted by the end. I will tell the tale of day 2 later, after I recuperate a little bit.
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