My mom, brother, and nephew are visiting, and at my nephew’s enthusiastic request, we all spent the afternoon at the “aquatic center” yesterday.
Getting out of the water was hard. After four or five trips around the lazy river, I’d gotten very used to floating. Putting my feet down and standing up in three-foot water was okay, but each step up the long ramp out of the water meant a little more of my weight that I had to support myself.
Jackie and I usually float together around the lazy river, and we did that this time for a couple of laps in the middle, but Jackie had sprinted off ahead for the first lap, in a hurry to float under the fountains that sprayed over the stretch just before the ramp where we’d entered. She waited there, and once I arrived we floated a couple times around together.
Maybe it’s the nature of lazy rivers; more likely it’s the nature of my family, but it seemed perfectly ordinary that we all ended up at the lazy river: Daniel having been floating in a different part of the river, but turning up near the entrance at the same time Jackie and I floated past and noticed Steve standing near the entrance.
I pointed Steve toward the corral with the tubes. Once he put his hands on one, we headed down the lazy river as a group, in direct contravention of some rule against ganging up more than two of the tubes. It was too much trouble to keep hanging onto one another, so pretty soon we were rule-abiding again.
It was the sun that got me out. Even slathered up with sunblock, an hour of floating is about all the sun I can take.
Except for the transition of the hard trudge up out of the water, the rest of the afternoon was very pleasant, even for someone who’d gotten used to floating: A place to sit in the shade, a large soda from the concession stand, and conversation with Steve and Lucy.