Days 47 and 48 on the road – In Bandera

Sunday started out beautifully.  While Alexis made a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon, I ran to the grocery store to stock up on a few things we needed for our trip tubing down the Medina River with Jason and Chris, who joined us for breakfast shortly after I got back.

After breakfast, Alexis and Jason went to drop off our pickup where we planned to exit the river some six or seven miles away, and while they were gone, Chris and I aired up the innertubes and the raft.  I lashed the ice chest full of cold drinks into a tube (later in the day it would end up on the raft), packed up the waterproof cameras, the walkie talkies, the sunblock, the bug spray, and we were ready to roll.

Once Alexis and Jason returned at about 1:00 p.m., we all changed into our suits, grabbed up all our gear, and walked down the hill to the river, leaving our cell phones at home lest they get dunked in the water and ruined.  Here at the RV park, the entrance to the river is a good depth for tubing and has a nice current. We would soon find out that wasn’t the case for the entire route.

I should point out that both Jason and Chris are fit people.  Alexis and I are not.  We are both big women who get very little exercise normally.  Tubing seemed like the ideal outdoor diversion.  After all, you just plop your booty down on an inner tube and float on the water, periodically paddling so as to avoid obstacles. At least that’s what tubing is USUALLY like.  I’d have to say we spent about as much time walking the river as tubing it, and walking it was frightening.

The Medina River has a limestone bed, and in many places along the stretch we traveled, there was only a couple of inches of water covering it.  That meant getting up and hiking to the next deep section of the river.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Not so much.  The limestone has been carved out by the water over the centuries so that the walking over it requires mountain goat-like balance.  Jason had broken his toes a few weeks ago, and my ankle was still swollen and weak, so the two of us struggled to make our way across these shallow sections.  So did Lex, who was trying desperately not to fall down.  Well, we all fell down at some point or another during the course of the day.  The only who seemed sure-footed enough to move at more than a snail’s pace across the treacherous rock was Chris.  He’s very tall and slender and apparently more nimble than I would have guessed.

I started out in the raft but soon realized that all the getting in and out of the raft would be a challenge every time we hit a shallow area, so I switched to a tube, and we moved all our “stuff” into the raft.  So as not to lose the raft, it was tied on to my tube.  I tried to stay in front of the raft, but often a current would take it and pull it ahead of me so that I was trailing it from behind.  The raft had oars, so I had one and Jason had one.  We used them to help move us along during the parts of the river that were virtually still (and in a couple of places, where the current actually ran backwards).  Jason was much more efficient with the paddle than I was.  I haven’t been tubing or rafting in a couple of decades, so I was moving slowly.  Lex didn’t want to get left behind, so she grabbed hold of the raft, and the two of us traveled together most of the time.  This meant I was trying to haul the two of us, a raft, and our gear.  That worked well.  Not.

Chris and Jason were usually a considerable distance ahead of us both, with Chris acting as our lookout, finding places we could best forge the small rapids on the river.  Alexis and I trailed behind, trying to keep up as best we could.  At one point, a pair of kayakers passed us, and one of them took mercy on us, letting us grab ahold of his kayak while he paddled us along for a few minutes, letting us catch up with Jason and Chris.  The first hour or two was fun, a little adventure for us all.  When we passed the two-hour mark, there was less laughing and chatting and more concern about when it was, exactly, we would be able to get out of the water.

For all our planning and preparation, we overlooked something.  None of us thought to look at a map and figure out how far it was down the river from where we got in to where we planned on getting out.  Also, none of us really had any idea how deep the river would be and whether it would be suitable for tubing.  Turns out the river really wasn’t suitable at all, so a distance that on a swifter, deeper river we could have covered in perhaps two hours took us 8.5 hours.

When the shadows started getting longer, we began to get concerned.  None of us wanted to be out on the water after dark, but we didn’t want to be trekking through brush or open pasture, either, especially since no one had a flashlight.  We hadn’t thought we’d need one.  We figured we’d be done with our little adventure well before nightfall.  We finally came on a couple of houses that backed up to the river at about 8:30 p.m., so we got out of the water and started walking across a mowed pasture towards a driveway that cut through a private ranch.  This was a risk, of course, because we had no idea who might live there, whether or not they’d be armed, or have guard dogs, but given the choice of staying on the river one minute longer and risk of looking down the wrong end of a shotgun barrel, we chose the latter.

Turns out no one was at home on the ranch.  It looked like a resort with beautiful houses and cabins, paved drives, sparkling pool, pretty water features and gardens everywhere.  But there was not a soul around.  We actually knocked at the main house where a light was on, but no one answered.  We continued our walk, hoping to run into a public road.  In all, we walked about two miles from the river to the ranch’s gate where we encountered another major obstacle.

It was dark, the gate was in the middle of a cattle guard, and it was locked, openable only by way of a key code which none of us had any way of guessing.  The gate was also six feet high and made of vertical bars.  The fencing surrounding the gate was deer fence, also about six feet high.  Jason and Chris were able to shimmy up and over the gate (thank goodness for tall people) and go for help, leaving Alexis and I standing on the wrong side of the gate in the dark with blistered feet and painful sunburns.  Alexis had had enough hours before this.  Being lost in the dark was just about more than she could bear.  I assured her we’d be fine, the dark was no danger to us, and help would come.  Of course, I had no idea if it would, but I had to hope!

There was a house just on the other side of the gate, so Jason and Chris knocked.   Nobody was home.  They saw the lights of an approaching car so ran up the gravel road to try to flag it down, but it turned down a street a quarter mile away.  They continued walking hoping to come on another house, but before they did, a truck approached.  The driver stopped and gave them a ride back to where we stood.  Turns out the driver and his wife were the owners of the house just on the other side of the gate.  Our rescuer, Steve, had a ladder in his garage which he brought out and levered over the fence.  He backed his truck up to the fence so we wouldn’t have to fall six feet to the cattle guard below.  In this way, Lex and I were able to cross the fence.

He invited us into the house to use the restroom, and his wife offered us bottles of cold water.  The two of them were so very kind.  Steve then gave all four of us a ride back to the RV park.  For all our travails, that ride was disappointingly short.  Lex would later measure the distance on the map.  We’d gone less than three miles down the river in all that time!

Once we were back at the RV, I made sure we all had Tylenol, Solarcaine, and aloe vera gel and cold bottles of water.  Alexis, Jason, and Chris went to go pick up our truck only to find that the park where they had parked had been locked. The keys to the gate were in our truck, so  Jason and Chris had to maneuver themselves through the gate, walk a quarter of a mile to the truck and drive it back up to the gate.  Given the sorry state we were all in, I’m sure this walk didn’t help matters at all.  Alexis and Jason then went to go get food for us at Dairy Queen, and Chris went home.

In the meantime, I’d taken a nice, cold shower and had slathered myself with as much aloe vera as I possibly could.  I’d curled up in bed with a bottle of water and watched TV, trying to ignore the fact that my whole body was on fire.  Lex came with manna from the heavens (also known as tacos), so I got something to eat before falling asleep.

Waking up this morning was a painful affair.  I was lobster red, especially my legs, and it felt as though my skin had grown two sizes smaller during the night, making bending and moving excruciating.  I did manage to crawl out of bed and put on the loosest clothes I could find.  Jason called; he was so badly burned that he stayed home from work today, but Chris had gone in.  I don’t know how; he’s the fairest-complected of us all, and his legs were horribly burned.  Just a tough cookie, I guess.  I talked Jason into coming over so we could eat and go into town and get some more sunburn medicine.  Poor thing showed up in pajama pants, a tshirt, and houseshoes.  He couldn’t bear to put on anything more fitted.  He hadn’t had a shirt on yesterday while tubing, so he was red all over, even redder than I was, and that’s saying something.

We ate a brunch of leftover tacos and brisket then walked as briskly as we could from the RV to the truck so as to avoid the sun’s rays, and then drove into Bandera.  I ran a series of errands before going to the pharmacy.  We also looked for a photo processing place but had no luck.  We’d had a pair of waterproof cameras on our journey, and Jason agreed to take them into San Antonio when he goes to work tomorrow and drop them off for developing.  I imagine there will be several pictures of us with grim faces, looking for all the world as if we were on the Bataan Death March (Float).

We grabbed some cold drinks from Sonic and headed back to the RV park.  Jason excused himself and went back home to sleep, and I did the same after a while, napping the whole afternoon away.  Now it’s dinnertime, and no one feels like cooking.  Alexis’ muscles are so sore she can barely move.  Mind you, being a Black woman on this trip did pay off in one way; she wasn’t nearly as burned as the rest of us were.  Still, she didn’t come away unscathed.  Along with her sore muscles, her back is killing her where she slipped and fell against a big rock in the river.

It may be a while before we can really laugh at ourselves without the laughter being tinged with hysteria.  The whole affair was painful and embarrassing, but it could have been so much worse.  As I mentioned at the start, none of us brought a phone, so we had no way of calling for help.  One of us could have fallen and broken a bone, we could have gotten bitten by a snake, or had heatstroke.  None of that happened. We were lucky.  As excited as we were about this trip, we hadn’t given much thought to the possibility that we might get lost or might have miscalculated the distance or the navigability of the river itself.  The walkie talkies were useless.  One of them got dunked in water and was ruined, and I scanned the channels on the other, but I couldn’t raise anyone.  Does anyone even use CB radio anymore?  Had the worst happened, we would have had no way of getting help in a timely manner, so we’re truly fortunate.

I came away from this feeling like such a greenhorn.  I grew up in the country, so I really should have known better, planned better.  It’s been a long time, though, so now I’m just a tourist in the more rural parts of the world.  The Texas Hill Country is beautiful, but its terrain and climate can be unforgiving.  People who ignore this fact do so at their own peril.

I’m hoping that the worst of the sunburn pain will have abated tomorrow.  I want to get cracking on researching my great-grandfather’s family history.  I actually got a response from my e-mail inquiry.  The woman who contacted me gave me the name and number of my great-grandfather’s daughter-in-law.  I called her, and she was very kind to me, gave me what information she could, and pointed me to one of my great-grandfather’s nephews.  I plan to give him a call tomorrow and see what I can learn.  I’m also hoping to go back into town and visit the Frontier Times Museum, a huge collection of memorabilia and artifacts from the Old West.  Thursday night we’re planning on going to the movies with Jason and Chris and Friday night I’m hoping to take Alexis to her first rodeo.

Let’s face it, the week can’t do anything but get better!  Knock wood.

Tags: Bandera, Medina River, Texas, Travel, tubing