SUP baby

Take me out to dinner!!! (missed that reference? tap here haha)

..or out to the lake that I don’t think I realized existed in the middle of the desert!

I am so glad we discovered it though, because oh baby, what a day it was. I guess we should’ve known it was gonna be an interesting day when it started with “oh good, you guys are the travel nurses, right? do you think I need stitches?” as soon as we walked into NoSnowSUP to rent our boards for the day. Thankfully, a trip to the ER was not on the agenda, and after a little bit of manual pressure held on the wound and three sets of nurse's eyes, the shop owners had loaded up the boards on Shel's car, we were plugging in "Butcher Jones" to the gps, and we were back on the road!!

The ride was beautiful, as much of sunny Arizona is, but as we pulled up to the beach, we became so much more excited. We unloaded our boards, snacks, sunscreen, and high boobs (more formally known as high noons, our favorite seltzers. If you have not tried these yet, you definitely should. We discovered two new flavors- guava and kiwi- in the limited edition pool pack, but we have learned that they taste just as good lakeside as we're sure they will poolside) and started our adventure on the water.

Don't let this photo fool you, most of the time, we were actually partaking in "sit down paddle boarding" thanks to the wakes caused by the passing boats and jet skis. SUP is already a difficult activity in still water, but my goodness my muscles were a tiny bit angry the next day after even the short bits of stand up I tried to do.. SO sore and tired, but in such a good way. The day was full of great views, great friends, and great adventures.

We had packed sandwiches (thank you Momma Shel ;)) and after paddling around a little, found a beach in an alcove to pull our boards up to for a quick lunch break. A couple had found the spot before us, and during our time there, three other groups (all with doggos!) discovered the same spot and joined us in our adventuring.

If you haven't realized from any of my previous posts, Shel and I love making new friends, especially four legged friends. You can meet Beau and CJ in these photos below!

CJ was an especially smart boy.. so smart in fact that he had a boat! Can you even imagine! After spending some time on the beach together, CJ, or CJ's human rather, offered to take one of us back to the beach to pack up our belongings and grab our crewnecks so that we could enjoy the lake a little later than we originally anticipated. I was "voluntold" as the strongest paddler to be the one to board the boat and then paddle to shore to rescue our belongings and scurry on back to the girls (and CJ ;)).

The other non-human friend that deserves a bit of a shoutout is this lil friend who did an excellent job at standing still posing for photos. We, on the other hand, are a fan of live photos to slide along and get the perfect point where we're all smiling right without anyone blinking.. maybe we should take a page out of his book?

Although the only thing I noticed wrong with these particular photos is CJ's guest appearance.. make sure to find the little > arrow on the right and slide over to see for yourself smh. Hopefully it gives you just as much of a chuckle as it did me when I was picking through the photos for this post.

Beyond the friends, laughs, food (shoutout to the steak CJ's humans made, omg that was so tasty!), and high boobs.. I am so glad we stuck around for my favorite part of the whole damn day, sunset. The way the clouds decorated the sky behind the mountains and the light reflected on the water was absolutely gorgeous.

After slowly paddling away from our little afternoon oasis and enjoying soaking in the gorgeous sunset, CJ's humans started to pass us on their boat. We were doing a poor job of racing them back to the marina for the free concert on the water we spontaneously decided to attend, but before we could finish whispering "why can't they tow us back?" they were holding up a rope and waving us over to the back of the boat. In the fleeting light, we quickly threw the rope around to each other to secure our boards (and ourselves) off the back of the boat, and next thing we knew it we were at the marina!

We were fully prepared to enjoy the concert from the comfort of our boards, but CJ's mom had other plans for us as she yelled out, "okay girls, come on up!" and we very carefully (but very enthusiastically) climbed up onto the boat (one of us had already taken a little stumble off our boards.. her name starts with Sh and ends with el, but I won't call her out too much.. like I said, SUP is very difficult!!) and falling in with the sun down would have been a verrrry chilly endeavor. I was thankful that we had packed crewnecks because just sitting on the boat was chilly in itself, but watching the concert while enjoying playing hide and seek with the full moon sneaking in and out of the clouds was such a dream.

Before it became actually time to lay our heads down to sleep and dream, the concert concluded and CJ and his humans took us back as close to shore as safely possible. This was the only part of the day where we maybe slightly regretted staying out on the boards this late. The same darling bestie of mine who let gravity overtake her earlier in the day got in a fight with a fallen over tree.. her poor knee collided with the not so sandy beach (as in the beach was made up of full on rocks) and she bought herself a gnarly battle wound to round out our adventure. We try so hard to make a point to not play nurse on our days off, but I am her bestie for crying out loud, so I managed to make an exception when we got home.

Thankfully, the paddle board owners were incredibly accommodating to our adventures and gave us the code to their trailer to lock up our boards after we returned with them a little later than originally anticipating. They also got a kick out of our photo proving that we had returned everything as Shel posed, wound and all, in the back of the trailer.

If you're ever looking for a place to rent boards, we cannot recommend NoSnowSUP enough. Special shoutout also goes to our bartender at Wondering Tortoise who recommended them to us in the first place! Can't wait to go back and tell her about all the fun we had, and hopefully make it back out on the water soon for some more adventuring, and hopefully lots more doggos hehehe.