Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Floating Down the Guadalupe River: White Trash Vacay




We decided to grab one more get away before school starts and chose to head to the Texas Hill Country to go tubing down the river.  Tubing down the Guadalupe in an inner tube with a beer is a Texas tradition, and one, believe it or not, I have never participated in. We loaded up a cooler, packed some cut-offs, put the kids in the mini van and headed to our cabin rental at The Lazy R & R Cove in Canyon Lake.  We pulled in and Sugar Snap immediately voiced her disapproval.  She has not yet come to terms with her WT roots.  She firmly believes a grievous mistake has been made somewhere along the way and the Royal family will be showing up at our doorstep any day now to reclaim her.  In her defense, I did not expect the cabins to be quite so rustic.  First of all, you have to ring a bell attached to a chain and the manager descends from his trailer nearby to check you in.  The cabins are tiny.  They sleep 4 - there is one double bed and a fold out couch, and when the couch bed is open you cannot walk between the two.  There is a separate bathroom and a kitchenette which includes a small fridge, a microwave, and a coffee maker.  And, blessedly, there is an air conditioner.  To call it a cabin is slightly  misleading.  They are tiny shacks.  But, we didn't expect much for the price - it was $70/ night during a weeknight.  It was quiet, and we got to see a few deer, which was nice, and a few scorpions, which was not.    They will rent you inner tubes, if you can get someone to answer when you ring the little bell.  They are a little inconsistent with the prices, however.  The website says inner tubes rent for $1/day, one manager told us she thought it was $10/day, and the other manager said no, rentals were $5/day.  They wound up charging us $2/day per inner tube.  There was a place to enter the river that's about a 10 minute walk from the cabins.  The river was moving, albeit slowly, and it was deep enough that we could not touch the muddy grody bottom.  Overall, the website is pretty difficult to navigate, but is fairly honest about what to expect.  The only real surprise was there was NO hot water in the shower.  It was a hot day, so it was livable, but really???  In this day and age no hot water?  I guess I should just be grateful the toilet flushed.