An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

After saying goodbye to Ted this morning - he's off to Boy Scout camp - I headed out to Ft. Smallwood Park in Pasadena, MD to do some kayaking on the Bay. I carpoooled up there with my friend Tom. That always adds to the experience, both because Tom's a nice guy and because he literally strokes the dashboard of his well-worn Saturn station wagon to coax it to keep going for one ... more ... trip. The launch site for this trip is a new one - well, at least kayak access is. Our trip organizer, Gina, lives nearby and wanted to introduce folks to this new launch. Sixteen of us in total, from all directions, showed up, and no one but Gina had been there before. I'd say Ft. Smallwood's kayak launch coming out party was a success. The conditions were choppier than predicted. 1-2 foot waves, and quite confused in places, making it hard at times to maintain direction. I guess this was a result of a combination of wind, boat wakes and tid al currents, as the wind wasn't stro...

Sunday morning I woke up early as usual. It was a beautiful day and I knew it would be several hours before the rest of the family woke up. Kayak? Boy, I wished I had loaded the boat on top of the car the night before, as I was feeling just a little too lazy to deal with it right at the moment. Besides, the overhead of a paddling trip - loading, driving to the river, driving home, unloading - would take more time than I felt like investing in the morning's outing. I decided to have breakfast, read the paper and think up an alternate plan. How about biking? Well, that would have a lot of the same overhead -- but wait, there's a bike trail two blocks from my house! And I've heard that the county has built a new connector trail from the terminus of my local trail to the Mt. Vernon trail. I decide that the W&OD / Mt. Vernon / Custis Trail loop is exactly what I the doctor ordered and in a few minutes I'm out the door. It's 7:10 AM. The first 4.5 miles of the ride ar...

Sometimes you just have to do something that doesn’t make sense. So when my friend Zgrav suggested driving nine hours to Asheville, North Carolina to go geocaching, I said, “heck, yeah!” Before I continue, a little background on the sport. Geocaching is a GPS-assisted treasure hunting game. You use your GPS to guide you to a spots where people have hidden little “caches” – containers ranging in size from pinky-tip up to briefcase size. The real point of the game is in the hunting rather than the finding – sort of like catch-and-release fishing. Geocaches each carry a two dimensional rating –difficulty and terrain – as to how hard they are to find. The easiest ones you can drive right up to. At the opposite extreme, there are geocaches that require solving hard puzzles, use of a specialized gear (helicopters, free-climbing, SCUBA) and a host of other challenges. The most challenging cache level is 5/5. Asheville is overall something of a caching mecca, and is home to a couple of 5/5 cac...

It's been a rainy week. Not just the usual Washington summer afternoon thunderstorms, but heavy downpours 5 AM thunderstorms, flash flood warnings, the works. So it was with a severe weather watch in place and some trepidation that I headed down to Columbia Island last night. The consoling factor was that I had checked the weather report right before heading out from work, and the skies looked like they would be largely clear until about 9 PM. My friend Dave has a new fixation with doing yoga warmups before paddling. I think he has been influenced by both Dubside and our friend Gina, who is a yoga instructor in addition to being a paddler. Interestingly, I had been thinking just the day before, when doing my 20 minutes of stretching before my 40 minute run, that it's funny that I stretch so much for running and erg-ing, but not at all for kayaking. So, when Dave suggested yoga, I was happy to take part. We must have been quite a sight, about half a dozen of us going through var...