Back in the early 90’s when I was living in Madison, WI, my girlfriend Lona and I had heard about these awesome 2-day/1-night canoe/camping trips down the Wisconsin River. You drive to the town of Prairie du Sac and park your car at the canoe outfitter place on the river. They fit you with a canoe, paddles, life-preservers and a map, and you supply your own tent, sleeping bags, cooler, whatever…and off you go! You paddle down the river, camp on one of the millions of ever-shifting sandbars, and then the next day about 20 or 25 miles down river you pull out at the town of Spring Green where a bus is waiting to take you and the canoe back up the river to where your car is parked. Inexpensive, and very cool.
So day 1, it was a beautiful summer day and we were happily floating lazily down the river, occasionally paddling when we felt like it, and just enjoying the sun and nature. I had a line in the water and wasn’t catching any fish, but I didn’t care. We would stop at sand bars, swim, fish, fool around, eat, whatever, and then back into the canoe. Occasionally we would see another canoe or kayaker, but it was pretty sparse and we felt like the wilderness was all ours. But then about mid-afternoon on the first day we spotted off in the distance a whole bunch of people on a huge wide stretch of beach.
We were enjoying the beautiful wilderness so much we decided we would just blow past the crowded beach and keep to ourselves, but then as we got closer we realized everyone was naked…it was a nude beach! Cool! We had just got back from a 2 month trip to Greece. It was our second trip there and all the beaches are topless and many totally nude, so being naked was nothing to us. We loved and missed Greece and figured this would be a small way to sort of get back there in our minds. So thinking it would be extra cool to arrive naked, we peeled off our bathing suits and happily paddled over there.
We pulled up on shore to the nearest part of the beach and while Lona lingered back at the canoe gathering some towels and beers and such, I hopped out and walked up shore a little ways to look around. Suddenly I noticed two guys heading towards me and I flashed them a big smile and said ‘hi’ and proceeded to make small talk. We chatted for a minute and they were incredibly nice, but then one of them offered me his towel and said I could borrow it if I wanted. Huh? Why? “Uh, no thanks, we have our own.” I said, as I motioned off towards Lona who was just starting to walk up the beach with towels in hand. They both glanced over at her, frowned, and without a word just turned around and walked away.
That was weird. Lona walked up and I told her what happened. She started looking around and then said: “Do you notice anything strange about this beach?” This was before I got lasik surgery and I did not have my glasses on, so I squinted hard and looked around at the sea of flesh. It seemed like people were staring at us. Maybe this was this a private beach? Wait, that’s weird…the beach was packed but there did not appear to be any women anywhere. Just then another dude walked up to us and with a friendly smile says: “Um, excuse me, but you might be a little more comfortable over there.” and he points about a quarter mile down the river to the far side of the beach.
Oh crap, we were at a men’s gay beach. The far side of the beach was full of dudes and chicks and was the hetero side, but the side that we had pulled up to was the gay side. We tried to nonchalantly walk back to the canoe, but when we got there we quickly jumped in and paddled away, feeling all the eyes on our naked butts as we made our escape. We were a tad embarrassed so we decided to not even stop at the hetero side…we just kept paddling as fast as we could down the river and back to nature. We did not bother to put our suits back on however and enjoyed much of the rest of the trip au naturel.
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