Annual Tubing Trip!

The Hansen family enjoyed our annual tubing trip in Eldora, Iowa on the Iowa River!

This traditon started about 5 years ago and it proves to be a blast each year!

We drove to Iowa Friday afternoon, arriving at the camp site (The Benham's were our hosts!) about 6:00 and set up camp! ... excited for our tubing trip the next day!

With all our tubes blown up, coolers packed and our excitement on overload we hit the river about 11:30! There were about 30 of us, so it quite an ordeal to get all that orchestrated!

The trip is 4 miles long and ususally takes about 4 hours, but we stopped at a few of the sand bars and visited and ate lunch. All in all, it took us just over 5 hours for the float. And to boot: everyone behaved themselves! (and Hunter did not have any near death experiences like he did last summer!)

After we got back to the camp site, Graden and Chad left and headed for the Independance stock car races, where Graden would then head to Manchester for the night ... and then head to Prairie du Chein for a fishing tournament Sunday morning. It was a busy weekend!

Hunter, Dayne and I stayed at the camp site and enjoyed our time with our home town friends! Trista has two girls that Dayne *loves* to hang out with, plus little Lexie "LuLu" so she was in heaven! We called it a night just before midnight and got up the next morning to pack up our tent and belongings ... and head for my dad's house - to spend the day with him! Something I don't do near as often as I should!

The kids and I got to my dad's house about 10:00 Sunday morning and spent a beautiful afternoon with Dad and Susan. It is so relaxing at their home ... I just love being there.

About 2:00 Donna joined us for lunch .... then shortly afterwards we headed out, to pick Graden up from the truck stop in Elk Run (where his fishing buddy dropped him off, to save me a trip to Manchester! P.S. They won first place in their fishing "derby" - - including Big Bass!).

After getting Graden we headed to Gretchen's place to get TJ - who is staying with us for 2 weeks while Dayne stays with Nana for 2 weeks. We felt TJ would be good to get some "man" time since the poor kid is always around women, women, women!!

We finally hit the road for home about 5:30 ... and got home about 11:15 Sunday night.

We are looking forward to our time with TJ, but will miss our baby girl, Dayne!