Road Noise

The bicycling community has a lot of cutesy ideas and affectations, most of which I ignore. But there is this thing to ride your age in miles on your birthday. Well, my birthday turned out to be a nice weather day (for late November) and my recollection was that my calendar was empty, so on the spur of the moment I decided to blow off work and do a fifty-seven mile bike ride. As always, I chose the default, lazy route - hopping on the W&OD bike trail, which passes within a few blocks of my house, and just riding 28 1/2 miles out, then turning around and riding 28 1/2 miles bake. Or thereabouts - that distance takes me to the eastern outskirts of Leesburg, and just a little further gets you to a shopping center with a Dunkin' Donuts and a Starbucks. Given that it was a bit chilly I figured I might enjoy a coffee break at my turnaround point.

At about 10:30 AM, about eight miles short of my planned turnaround I stopped to use the Porta-potty at Smith's Switch Station (the older you get, both the miles and the number of potty breaks increase). I checked my phone to make sure nothing dire was happening at work and noticed an email from a colleague forwarding the documents I needed for our 11 AM call with a potential teaming partner. Uh oh. I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to participate in this call. Hmmm, what to do? I wasn't going to get to the turnaround in 30 minutes (I'm not a 16 MPH rider). Turn around? No, that wouldn't really get me anywhere. Email that I couldn't make the call after all? Nahh, I didn't want to leave my colleague in the lurch. So, I decided to ride on.

At 11 AM I was just a mile and change short of my destination. I pulled off to the side of the trail and dialed in - but I really didn't want to stand there in the cold for the whole call, so I told them that I was "in the car" on my way back from another appointment and was going to stay on mute because of road noise. I put the phone on speaker and muted it and held it in one hand while I continued to ride - slowly - along the trail. I didn't have the deterity to work the phone with one gloved hand while riding, so any time I needed to participate I'd stop, unmute the phone, say my piece, remute the phone, then keep riding. Fortunately, this didn't go on for too long, as it took me only five minutes or so to get to the doughnut shop. Also fortunate is that my colleague really likes to talk and it was his call, so I was mostly able to just listen and ride.

Once I got to the doughnut shop things got easier. While my colleague blathered on I ordered a doughnut as a birthday treat (I don't usually eat doughuts) and a regular coffee as a ride enhancer. Caffeine is a staple of my longer rides. It's something that I also usually avoid, which makes it super effective as an athletic performance enhancer. A cup of coffee and I'm recharged for a lot of miles.

Thanks to my colleague's loquaciousness what should have been a thirty minute call lasted almost an hour. Once we finally finished I packed up my puffy jacket in my seat bag (it was warming up nicely), put the rest of my gear on, and headed home. The ride home was uneventful, but between riding more slowly than I anticipate and the call, what I expected to be a five hour outing took seven - essentially an all day affair. total mileage was 60.9 - that's 57 for my age and 3.9 for good luck (and doughnuts).

Chincoteague

One of the challenges with being a wildly popular blogger is that sometimes your fans come up to you on the street and beg you to write about their favorite subjects. This happened to me most recently at Columbia Island when one of my biggest fans asked me to write about my recent trip to Chincoteague.

The origin of this trip really goes back to 2014 when I was part of group trip to Chincoteague. This led to a return to Chincoteague, this time with spouses, in 2016. That trip was a lot of fun for just about everyone - though not so much so for Valerie, whose mom was fatally ill (she died just days after the trip). Still, the experience of getting everyone including significant others together was so enjoyable that we vowed to do it again. Life got in the way for a while, but I eventually orchestrated a follow-on group get-together, this one a combination of paddling and bluegrass music at Claytor Lake/Floyd, VA. At the end of that trip we started thinking about the next follow-on and decided it would be a return to Chincoteague, this time all squeezing into Jim G's house there. Which brings us to the present trip.

Jim had long talked about his house in Chincoteague, but in his self-deprecating way had described it as being quite modest. Valerie and I rolled up on Friday to discover that it was, in fact, a spacious and lovely farmhouse, tastefully decorated in a style that combined farmhouse and seashore styles (you can see it here). Valerie and I were the first after Jim to arrive - which gave us first crack at choice of bedrooms, something of value since the group was pushing the capacity of the house. Jim headed off to paddle while Valerie and I settled in after our long drive, venturing only as far as downtown Chincoteague a few blocks away where we got lunch and shopped at a gourmet sandwich shop.

Others soon began arriving. Rob and Barb arrived all excited about the pony penning that was apparently going on that weekend. This is not the big pony swim and auction - that's in July. Rather, in the spring and fall the "saltwater cowboys" of Assateague round up ponies to do a health check and identify any new foals.

Here come some ponies

Valerie chose to hang back at the house while Rob, Barb and I headed over to check out the pony event. Thanks to Misty of Chincoteague, the wild ponies of Assateague/Chincoteague are nationally famous and the event drew spectators from all over. Some people next to us had driven in from the mid-west (I forget where - all those mid-west states are kinda the same). There were pony junkies who could identify individual horses in the herd, maybe from studying web sites such as this one, which has individual pictures of ponies along with their names.

Ponies in the pen

It was one of those events that was fun because it was an event. I'm not a pony junkie, and standing around waiting for the cowboys to occasionally drive some horses into the pen wasn't all that interesting, but the air of excitement and the energy of the spectator group made it a fun, celebratory event. Eventually the event wound down and we headed back to the house, stopping along the way at the well-regarded Island Creamery for some awesome ice cream (so awesome that I had seconds - which is two more servings of ice cream than I usually allow myself).

Back at the house we settled into our typical mode of enjoying some drinks, over-eating, and socializing.

Dinner

Chilling out

Saturday, Kathy arrived, having set out super-early from DC. When it came time to head out for the day's activities we split into kayaking and non-kayaking groups. The non-paddling group strolled downtown, fetishized yarn, visited the beach, napped, and such. The kayakers headed to the launch at the southern end of the island at the end of Main Street. In previous years we had first dutifully stopped downtown to buy launch permits, but this time our Jim told us we didn't need them (signs to the contrary) and so we skipped this step. The wind had settled a little from Friday's gusty weather, but the residual wind combined with the tides made for somewhat slow going as we paddled across towards Assateague Island. We stopped several times to make sure everyone was OK, each time losing considerable ground as the wind and current pushed us back in the direction we had come. Finally, we all agreed that we were going to go looking for ponies and then dip into Tom's Cove. Alas, there were no ponies to be found - I suspect that they were all either penned up or too spooked by the previous day's round-up to show themselves. We made it fairly far down into Tom's Cover and even explored a little side channel which took us all the way to the road we had driven on the day before to see the ponies - but still saw no horses. I'm not sure if it was conditions, increasing age, illness (Suzanne had a bad cold) or confused decision-making, but while we muddled around on the water for quite a while we covered only about 8 1/2 miles. On our previous trip we had made it out to the sea buoy and over to the lighthouse for a paddle of 11+ miles. Maybe we're getting lazier, but when we finished up we still felt we had had a nice paddle.

Back at the house we settled into our typical mode of enjoying some drinks, over-eating, and socializing.

Glassy despite the currents

Where the water meets the sky

Lunch break

Stretching/relaxing during lunch

Tom's Cove channel

Sunday brought buckets of rain. Paddling in cold, drenching rain is no fun so instead we hung out, took our time packing up and clearing out the house, and then all went out for breakfast, where we over-ate and socialized. After that some of the group headed to the new Harriett Tubman Underground Railroad Museum. Valerie and I gritted our teeth and dove right into the drive home, which included awful bridge traffic. They've got one lane closed on the bridge which, combined with the fact that everyone on the eastern shore did what we did - packed up and headed home early - made for hours of delay. Yuck. Way to undo the mellowness of the weekend.

But still, well worth it. It did seem that the weekend was over almost as soon as it began - next time, three nights!

A Boring Bike Ride in Williamsburg

So, let me tell you about a really boring bike ride I took on the Capital Trail in Williamsburg, VA - but first, let me tell you about my cousins because that's an interesting, almost unbelievable story.

I have a very small family. I think as a result of this paucity of family connection I occasionally get a bee in my bonnet to search for distant relative online. Typically I've focused on my mother's side - a family with such a long history in Jerusalem that they've been the subject of an exhibition at an Israeli History Museum. Any number of people crow online about this family connection, making them easy to track down. One day, though, it dawned on me that there's a branch of my father's family that changed the spelling of their last name, essentially making up a new last name. I figured that an online search of the last name would have to turn up some hits of relatives.

Sure enough, searching that name yielded very few results. On Facebook there were three people - apparently two sisters of my generation and their elderly mother. I Facebook stalked the sisters a little. One of them seemed to be my kind of person - lots of pictures in tie-dye at jam band music festivals. But for whatever reason, I never got around to reaching out to them.

Fast forward a year or two to 2017. It's my birthday and I have tickets to see Dead & Company (the living remnants of the Grateful Dead) at the Capital One arena (nee MCI Center) in DC. Valerie and I are walking down 7th Street and I spot a familiar-looking couple. Suddenly it clicks - it's one of the sisters! Usually I'm pretty shy about this kind of stuff, but in this case I walked up to her and said, "You might think this is crazy, but is your last name 'Mistrough'?" (pronounced to rhyme with "pissed-off"). She said, "Actually, it's 'Mistrough'," (pronounced to rhyme with "bistro"). Apparently they changed the pronunciation as well as the spelling - but she knew the history of the family name enough to be intrigued. Fortunately, they're the kind of people who treat it as a really cool, mystical experience when approached by a stranger claiming to be a distant cousin who recognized them from Facebook. In contrast, faced with such a scenario I would be reflexively suspicious and wonder what kind of scam this weirdo stranger was trying to pull on me. That kind of thinking is probably why I have no friends. Anyway, we FB friended each other on the spot and promised to be in touch.

We did subsequently verify that we are in fact cousins. Her mom remembers my grandfather. They live in North Carolina, so it's pretty amazing to have run into them on a street corner in DC on the way to see a Dead show. Like, unbelievable plot twist unlikely. We stayed in touch online and even met up for a while at the LOCKN Festival in 2018. It was a little hard to chat there, what with the incredibly loud concert music, but at least we got to connect a little.

Which brings me to Hampton. When I got a pre-sale notification for tickets to Dead & Company in Hampton I sanpped up four tickets. Usually, there's plenty of demand among my local Deadhead friends - but this time, for a variety of reasons people weren't going to Hampton for the shows. So, I reached out to my cousins, who it turns out were planning on going but hadn't yet gotten tickets. So I offered them my extras. As seems to be our custom, we arrived separately at the arena, but somehow without knowing where they were amid 10,000 Deadheads outside in the dark I managed to walk right up to them in the parking lot. They're really nice people - we had a great time at the show together and finally got a chance to talk a little and get to know each other better.

Dead & company

Which brings me to the beginning of my story. I have a rule that the time doing an activity has to exceed the time spent traveling to get there. Seven hours in the car for a three hour concert wasn't going to cut it, unless I added some other activity while I was down there. I had thought about trying to meet up with the Chesapeake Paddlers group roving in the area that weekend, but I know from past experience that this trip leader's trips are hard to pin down - they never leave at the time they're supposed to (usually earlier), and the plan is decided somewhat last minute - so, to keep things simple I decided to go bike rather than boat. After a nice breakfast (the Hampton Inn in Williamsburg has cheese grits!) I headed over to Jamestown, the trail head of the Williamsburg to Richmond Capital Trail. I was aiming to ride about 50 miles but I had guessed wrong about the weather was a little underdressed for the temperature. Regular readers know how much I had being cold, so I settled for a slightly less than 30 mile ride - including stops in both directions to warm up in the bathroom at Chickahominy Regional Park. Ironically, Chickahominy is normally the base camp of the CPA trip, but this year they moved across the James River to Chippokes Plantation park.

Bundled up - but not enough

So, the Capital Trail has attractions at its eastern end (all the Williamsburg/Jamestown stuff) and then starting about 15 miles in you start to run across lots of historic plantations. If you look at a map of attractions along the trail, there's only one really boring, featureless section - which is exactly the section I rode. Oh, well.

Anyway, back at Jamestown I went inside the visitor center to change out of my goofy cycling clothes for the drive home. It was lunchtime and so I wandered into the cafeteria, where I wound up getting peanut soup, a buttermilk biscuit, and a salad. Not exactly health food, but how could I say no to good traditional Virginia food :)

Anyway, as promised at the start, a pretty featureless bike ride but with a great backstory the night before.