4th of July Weekend....good times...good injuries

I decided to go home for the 4th of July weekend and since my job actually gave me the 3rd and the 4th off, it was a very long weekend. I got to Justin's house around 8, but we ended up not doing anything that night. We watched a new TV show called Baby Borrowers. If you haven't seen this show, you need to watch it. It's about a bunch of 18-20 year olds that think they're ready to get married and have babies. In order to show them what it's really like, this show gives them a few days with an actual baby to take care of all on their own. When they're done with the baby they get toddlers, then teenagers, and finally, the elderly. It's really interesting! After we watched that, we rented some movies from Blockbuster and went to bed.

On Thursday morning, Justin and I ran a 5 mile trail around the Lakeshore Drive area. It's pretty awesome to have someone that will run with me. I love working out and running outside and it's really hard to find someone to do it with you, so I'm pretty lucky. After our run, Justin drove us to Mt. Cheaha in Alabama so that we could knock AL off of our list of highpoints to visit in the US. There was no hiking involved at this highpoint. Very few of the 50 states have really cool mountains to hike in order to get the highpoint. Many of them are drive ups, like Alabama was.



Thursday night we decided to grill out with Rob, Wade and Allison. Wade and Allison brought over the new dog, Dixie, a chocolate lab puppy. She was so cute, but Gizmo felt a little threatened. She warmed up to Dixie after some time. After eating dinner, we hung out in Justin's backyard playing a game called "washers". I had never heard of this game. It's apparently an "auburn thing". Basically, you throw a ring into a box to get points....that's it. When I changed clothes before cooking, I put on my Alabama shirt that my sister bought me for my birthday (best present ever Linds). I had totally forgotten that I was in bad territory to wear that shirt. Justin immediately went to his closet and put on his Auburn shirt.

We had some fun taking some "house divided" pictures, but then changed to keep us from killing each other. Justin told me before we started dating that he swore to himself that he would never date an Alabama fan...that worked out real well for ya babe!



On Friday (the 4th) we were suppose to go to see my nephew and take him to the pool, but the Smith's ended up double booking little man that day so we had to push our fun with him back to the next day. Instead, me and Justin and his roommate Rob decided to go to Alabama Adventure, the waterpark next to what was previously "Visionland". To our surprise, we had a TON of fun! The waterpark was by far the best! The lazy river was relaxing and the water rides were pretty awesome. Poor Rob rode everything by himself, however, he was lucky enough to get hit on by a 13 year old! I don't have any pictures of the waterpark because I couldn't bring my camera and risk getting it wet.

After the waterpark, the three of us went to the Trace Crossings pool. Justin parents live in Trace Crossings and if you read one of my first blog posts on how I met Justin, we met when we both lived in Trace Crossings, so this was a fun thing for me to do. I haven't been to that pool in over 10 years. My sister Jennifer and I literally lived at that pool while we were living in the neighborhood. Justin and I went to that pool together a couple of times back when we had our "summer of '98 crush" so it was really fun to go again. It definitely brought back so many memories :) That night we went over to see Ed and Dana (one of Justin's close friends and another friend that I hadn't seen since high school). Ed is Dana's boyfriend and he lives pretty close to Justin so we went over there to hang out and watch fireworks for the remainder of the evening.

The next day, Justin and I did our 5 mile run again, except he biked it twice for 10 miles while I ran. Afterwards we drove to Tuscaloosa to hang out with little man and grill out with my sister and her husband Jeff. We were hoping to go to the pool so I could see Anderson swim, but it was rainy and Anderson had a slight fever, so we stayed at home instead. Lindsey and I left to go to the grocery store while Jeff and Justin kept little man at the house. By the time I got back, Justin said that Anderson asked where I was several times. The little things like that make my heart melt :)

The next day was the big day. Dana and her boyfriend Ed wanted to go tubing on the Cahaba. Justin and I had originally planned to go canoeing on the Cahaba while I was in town, but thought that the water would be too low since it hadn't rained in a while. We decided to go anyway. We got a little lost getting there since the point where you get into the Cahaba is in the middle of nowhere! This is about the most redneck thing I've ever done to date, but it was so much fun!





Now comes the part where I almost died (well not literally, but I seriously thought I was going to). There were some rapids that we had to get down in order to continue floating down the river. Before we got in the water, we decided to tie all 5 tubes together just in case. When we got to the first rapid, Justin stood up to assess the situation to see if we could go down in our tubes or if it was too dangerous and we needed to walk around it. He stood up right in front of the drop off, but my tube kept going. I got turned around backwards and went down the rapid pulling the other 5 tubes with me. I was already halfway down the rapid before Justin had even realized that I passed him and at that point I was going so fast there wasn't really much he could do. Dana stuck it out and went down the rapids as well since she didn't have time to "jump ship". I was the only one that went backwards and because of the speed of the water, it pushed me off of my tube and I hit the bottom of the rapids (which was literally rocks covered by maybe a half a foot of water). I banged up both of my elbows and there's a huge scratch down my back.



This is what my back looked like afterwards. Now, this is nothing compared to what it looks like now that the bruising has had time to take effect (I'll try to get a picture of it now and post it on here later). You also can't see my elbows which now both contain bruises the size of tennis balls. It was a bad fall. I was underwater getting pushed into the deep part of the river by the rapids and couldn't get my head above water. It took a little over 4 hours to go down the river. It was really fun and I would do it again even with my accident. Such an awesome weekend!