Saturday, July 07, 2007

Be Kind to Your Web Footed Friends

So, I hope you all had a good 4th of July. I did. Not as good as last year (because, hello, last year I got married!) but still good. I made sure to make social arrangements as I did not want to be moping around the house with Ethan gone. So I tagged along with my friends up to some other friends' house in the valley. They live right on a lake, and have lots of toys to play with, including a float plane, a boat, a water tramampoline, a paddle boat, some oar boat type things, and these things called the Nuclear Globes, which were like human-sized hamster balls that you took on the water. They also had a hot tub!

Basically, we showed up around 1, had a dee-licious meal of burgers, corn, salad and beer, and then played all afternoon on the water. I had to borrow a wet suit as it was cloudy and the water was only about 55 to 60 degrees. But we rode the double inner tube, aka "Big Bertha" behind the boat, jumped on the tramampoline and in general had a raging good time. Then we came back, cooked ourselves in the hot tub, and finished off the day by paddling out on the lake to watch the neighbors try to blow themselves up.

All in all, most excellent.

It did strike me, however, that as usual, there are a few differences between AK and the rest of the country. As I was jumping off the trampoline into 55 degree water and having a blast, I thought, there is no way in hell anyone from the Lower 48 would even consider doing this. But we were all like "Hey, it's not raining! Bonus!" And then watching fireworks at 10:30 at night with the sun just setting behind the trees...well, it's just not the same. I do miss that from down south.

Anyway, like everything else we do, our 4th is just as fun -- with a slight Alaskan twist to make it work for us.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We need some pics of you rolling across the lake in a giant hamster ball. Sounds cool! What did those things look like?

L said...

Well, Heidi didn't bring her camera, so we don't have any pictures. They were basically giant clear plastic balls, with pink and yellow dots all over them where the connectors between the inside and outside layers were. They also had two open porthole looking things that you climbed in and out of. Dan managed to get the porthole facing the water and got a whole bunch of water in the ball.

The thing that sucked was that the connectors had rough edges on the inside, so your knees and hands got all roughed up. Plus, the ball made me feel slightly vomitous.