Hey, welcome back. March is finally here and it’s starting to feel like winter is slowly dying off (in an awesome Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe type of way). I couldn’t be more thrilled. We actually grilled on Sunday for the first time this year and watched the USA/Canada gold medal hockey game. I ate my face off, and watching hockey actually ended up ruling. The game was super close and even went to sudden death. Is it possible that hockey is in fact not lame? I’ll keep you posted on that as I do more research. In a strange turn of events, the night somehow ended in a group sing along of the entire Little Mermaid soundtrack, reprises and all (don’t ask, I’m not quite sure myself). Take that Canada.
Anyways, with spring being right around the corner I thought I would take this opportunity to talk in great detail about one of my all time favorite activities: Tubing.
Few things in this life will ever rival the triumphant feeling of slowly floating down a river in an inner tube, tied to several other wonderful friend’s inner tubes, drinking beers and Mike’s Hard Raspberry Lemonades (or strawberry pop) on a bright, hot summer afternoon. If you have never experienced it first hand, my heart aches for you. It is the thought and promise of future tubing excursions in fact that generally motivates me through the long Minnesota winter months. And so over the last three years or so, we have started this tradition of treking out to the Cannon River every July around my birthday for an epic tubing/camping weekend. Brings a smile to my face just typing this stuff. As we get closer to July I will try to break down some more detailed Do’s and Dont’s of Tubing, and hopefully at that time I’ll also be able to share with you a song off my new record all about this tubing tradition. For now though I just wanted to put the thought in everybody’s head while we still have all of spring and summer ahead of us: Make sure to go tubing this year. You owe at least that much to yourself.
Below is a very special Bonus Jam. It is easily the greatest song ever written about tubing and it rules super hard. It’s by Hockey Night, off their Top 5 Best Albums of the Decade record “Keep Guessin,” and it somehow manages to capture the wonder, joy, and lazyness of this incredible activity in musical form. Enjoy.
UPDATE: My iTunes file is too big to upload on here, so this is a link to the song on last.fm (Bonus Jam fail):
Hope you have a wonderful week. See you next Tuesday.
— Beak