By Dana McIntyre

My son Matthew has never been one to sit back and let life pass him by. He has always been busy doing something…being the Captain of the high school ice hockey team, or when he went through his skateboarding phase, or when he learned to play the guitar (“Hey mom, have you ever heard of a band called Pink Floyd?”) or whatever, he’s always stayed busy…and there’s usually a pretty good story to go along with it.

So one day when he brought some clothes home that desperately needed to be washed or just thrown away, I knew there would be a pretty funny explanation.

Now, anyone who is from the South can attest that Georgia has red clay, and not mud. Just like kudzu that grows on everything standing still, & yellow pollen covering every car in the spring, our red clay can be recognized instantly. If you’re watching a movie and see red clay, you know immediately it was made in the great State of Georgia. (Smokey & The Bandit, Fried Green Tomatoes, My Cousin Vinny, Forrest Gump, & Deliverance to name a few. I’d like to not claim Deliverance because it’s what every Northerner thinks Georgia is all about, but what would Northerner’s talk about if not for us?)

Matthew pulled out his iPhone and I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw some of the pictures they had taken of the day’s events. The boys had clearly been out “mudding” on their dirt bikes & 4 wheelers because they were covered from head to toe in red clay.

I asked Matthew if they had fun & he said yeah, they were “mud tubing.”

It all started after it rained every day for about a week. He had just gotten his driver’s license and he and the boys would drive around looking for a fun place to ride their dirt bikes. They found an open field that was already nothing but mud and had been riding bikes for a while when someone said the infamous Southern words that makes every mother cringe….”Hey y’all – watch THIS!!!”

Someone grabbed an inner tube out of the back of someone’s truck and tied it to a four wheeler. The idea was to not only get dragged through the mud but to get sprayed by the chunks of mud coming off of the tires of the four wheeler. (What made me laugh was that apparently they have done this so much they had actually NAMED this event.)

My favorite picture shows mud tubing in action so I asked Matthew to explain:

Mud Tubing SM – YouTube.

And while he had fun tubing, let me just say that it’s not all fun and games trying to get that famous Georgia clay out of clothes!

Follow Dana on Twitter @DanaMcintyre1