An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

For the second year in a row I've signed up for Freezing Saddles, BikeArlington's friendly competition to encourage people to ride through the winter. As I've noted, it's mostly a light-hearted way to socialize with fellow cyclists, though some people take it very seriously. My team (and interloper SteveO) at the kickoff happy hour Last year I showed up at the opening happy hour knowing only four people: two friends from the kayaking world, and two neighbors. Fast-forward a year and - based on my participation in the morning "coffee clubs" as well as the online forums - there were so many people there I knew that I barely had time to talk with everyone. That was quite nice. One of the neat things is that in addition to the official scoring (you get points both for the number of days you ride and for mileage), participants are free to create their own prizes. There are prizes for the people who crash the most, for the most rides involving beer, most st...

This is Part I of a two part write-up of Valerie & my Christmas week trip to New Orleans Day 4, The Lost Day : Let me start this entry with something I forgot to mention in Part I . Valerie and I had both noticed that the guys in Benny Grunch and the Bunch sounded like they were from New York, even though they were New Orleans natives. On my previous trips to coastal Mississippi I had noticed that the natives there don’t have typical Southern accents and when I asked them (“Hey, how come you don’t sound like Foghorn Leghorn?”) they said that the coastal mix of people was different than the south. That turns out to be the case in New Orleans as well. The Ninth Ward accent sounds more like Brooklyn than Biloxi, more like Manhattan than Mobile. I’ve heard the explanation that because both areas developed a similar accent because they had the same mix of working class Irish, Italians, Germans, etc. That sort of thing always intrigues me. More here . I wanted to start with som...

This is Part I of a two part write-up of Valerie & my Christmas week trip to New Orleans Day 1, Travel : Our idea was to get a super-early start to minimize the amount of airport craziness we had to deal with flying on Christmas Eve. It worked – and all we had to do to make it work was to leave the house at 4 AM! Thanks to Valerie’s newly minted TSA Pre-Check card (I already had one) we sailed through security at the airport and were quickly on our way to Atlanta, where we got the Christmas present of having arrival and departure gates which were actually close to each other. When we got into New Orleans we went straight to our hotel (timeshare) where we were able to check in right away to a really nice, newly renovated unit. Checking in immediately was a big plus in two ways: first, it gave us a chance to lay in a supply of food, since we knew that not very much was going to be open in New Orleans on Christmas. Second, it gave us a chance to nap to make up for having wo...

Tall Tom, Rob, Suzanne and I decided to squeeze in one last kayak outing this year. Actually, Frank was supposed to have been a part of it too, which is an important point even though he wound up not going. Tom had originally suggested a one-way trip to the George Washington Grist Mill, and then I suggested a round-trip out of Pohick instead. Suzanne and Frank weren't all that happy about the idea of having to drive that far and so as a last-minute alternative I suggested an Anacostia trip out of Gravelly Point. My suggested route starts and ends with a one mile crossing of the Potomac and so is a little more open water than I like to do in the winter, but (a) we were running out of time for planning, and (b) the forecast looked pretty benign - air and water temps in the 40's, and 10 MPH winds. That's barely enough to ruffle my hair. All 1/16 of an inch of it. On the water just before turning around The four of us launched a little after 10 AM and found the Potomac a...