Cherry Blossom Paddle

First they said the cherry blossoms would peak really early, around St. Patrick's Day. Then March was cold and they pushed the forecast peak to late March. Then early April. Then later in April. Admittedly, the peak bloom forecast always moves around, but this year's particularly unsettled weather made it really hard to pin down a date for a cherry blossom kayak trip. I suggested to the PoG regulars that we do a cherry blossom paddle the last Thursday in March, but after the peak bloom was pushed into April I opted to delay a week to April 5th.  In all the confusion I lost some of my original group, but the PoG stalwarts showed up: Tom, Rob and Larry.

The best place to see the blossoms from the water happens to be the little Tidal Basin inlet directly across the river from Columbia lsland, so we started our paddle by crossing the river to the blossoms. Cherry blossom season always yields interesting sights, in this case some Asian women doing a fashion photo shoot and what looked to be a couple posing for wedding photos. For the record, my wedding was this first week in April (29 years ago!) and our wedding was less than a mile from the water but we didn't take waterfront photos. No, instead of beautiful pictures looking out over the controversially named Negro Bar Channel, we just posed outside the synagogue. I wasn't as much of a water person back then so detouring on our wedding day to take waterfront pictures didn't even occur to me. In addition, for various reasons our wedding took on an out of control freight train sort of life of its own, and so I doubt we would have risked having things go off the rails by heading to an additional location for pictures even if we had thought of it.

It had been quite windy and so the blossoms were less puffy than usual. I think the wind had blown off some of the blossoms. And it wasn't that we were off peak: the park service declared April 5th, the day we paddled to have been the peak bloom day.

Still, we had a nice outing - after blossom peeping we headed upriver, marveling at the features revealed by the unusually low tide. We continued on our usual route around Roosevelt Island then headed back to the marina.

As we were landing Gina (an ur PoG-ger from the Georgetown days) showed up on her bike and joined Rob and me for dinner. Tom had planned to come to dinner too but took a wrong turn and headed into the Bermuda triangle of roads that inter-tangle around the Pentagon. Or so he says ... perhaps he just abruptly reached his limit of being sociable and blew us off. Whatever the case, the three of us had a good time, discussing travels, relationships, interesting work projects and boat building over Nando chicken and sangria.

Heading out from the marina

Wsdding photos?

Rob, Tom and Larry

Me