Farewell Fiasco – Tubing the Provo

We got a good piece of advice from a missionary parent a few days ago:

Take the family out to do something fun after dropping off your missionary at the MTC. Since it’s such an emotional time, it’s important to go out and have a fun diversion instead of just going home and crying for the rest of the day.

That was our thought, anyway…

We thought we were prepared. We had picked up our rented tubes (deflated) and a pump before dropping Jake off at the MTC. Everything was in the back of the car ready to go.

We drove up to Vivian park and pulled out the pump and started getting ready for our awesome float trip.

But when I saw the pump I knew we were in trouble. It was just a dinky little thing. Since we didn’t have another choice I started pumping up our first tube.

To keep this post somewhat short, I’ll just summarize the next three hours:

• We found each tube took 30 minutes to inflate with our pump
• We learned the pump has to be “rested” for 10 minutes between tubes
• We learned our Suburban battery is just about cooked, so we must keep the Suburban running while the pump is running
• We found out that the nearby rafting adventure company doesn’t have a pump with the right kind of valves to inflate our tubes
• We drove down the canyon to a service station to fill up three tubes
• We found out that Seth gets super hangry after a couple hours of dealing with all of the above

After all of that, we were finally able to get on the river!

The float was great. We didn’t have any mishaps and the weather was beautiful and the water was cool and refreshing. We saw fish, a beaver, and otter, and several fisherman who tolerated our crazy crew floating through their prime fishing holes.

It really helped us to recover from the emotional rollercoaster of the morning. When we finally got off the river at 6pm we were ready to head home and face reality again.

Unfortunately, we then had to deflate all of the tubes, which was a giant pain! It took another two hours to deflate each tube, which was required before turning it back into the rental place. Never again!

So, learn from us. Next time we float the Provo River we will make sure to rent inflated tubes that can be returned inflated. If that means we have to pull a covered trailer or whatever to transport the tubes, so be it. We spent a small fortune in time and gas inflating and then deflating the stupid tubes. But, I have to admit, with all the chaos and craziness it ended up being a great diversion.