After paying $5 each, we hopped in the old school bus and drove upstream, just past the city of Helen. The bus driver pulled over at a clearing on the side of the road, we grabbed our inner tubes, climbed down the riverbank, and hopped in the water.  

We joked that in litigious California, there would have been a 10 minute safety video before boarding the bus, followed by a verbal repeat of the rules and a stern warning to "keep the life jackets on" and "no horseplay."  But this is northern Georgia, a place where they apparently assume if you've made it this far in life, you have enough common sense to carry you through the next two hours floating down a river.