I usually like to be on time, but recently I wound up being late for two different outdoor activities. But they turned out OK.
The first was Ralph's Cherry Blossom paddle. I left plenty of time to get there, but as I was driving there my stomach gave a little bit of a twist - the kind of feeling which sometimes signals that sometime soon I might need to find a bathroom in a hurry. Since my stomach had in fact been a little upset the day before, I decided it was worth it to detour to try to find a bathroom along the way, since we were launching from Gravely Point, which has no facilities other than some truly disgusting Port-potties. And I really wanted to take care of any digestion issues before I found myself out on the river in a dry suit.
My first thought was to detour to my home-away-from-home at Columbia Island, but for some reason lately they've been locking the bathrooms there, so instead I detoured into Rosslyn, figuring I'd head for the McDonald's. Long story short, the bathrooms there required a code and the place was crowded, so I decided to roll the dice and skip the bathroom break. It turned out not to be an issue.
I was surprised to find Ralph and a group of about ten other paddlers still there when I arrived at the marina ten minutes before the stated launch time of 10 AM. Ralph has the annoying habit of launching whenever he's ready without regard to agreed-upon launch times. As an example, I remember one Assateague camping trip where, fifteen minutes before our scheduled departure time, I ws still packing up my stuff and looked up to see the rest of the group caravaning out of the campground to head for the day's launch site.
Anyway, I managed to get ready in a real hurry and was ready to get underway at 10:01; however at that point we didn't actually launch. Rather, we did 10 minutes of warmup exercises on land, then launched.
As is always the case, the day of the Cherry Blossom paddle was breezy, with conditions forecast to worsen as the day went on. We could feel it when we headed across the river. A group from Waters Edge Kayak Meetup launched at the same time we did, except they left from Columbia Island. We could see them make their way across the river, and we met up with their group as we all approached the Tidal Basin. They looked at the trees for a bit then headed straight back - I assume they didn't like the choppy conditions. Being more hardy, we CPA'ers headed on, down towards Haines Point; however as soon as we got south of the 14th Street Bridge things really started to kick up. The wind was from the south and the tide was out, which combined with the clapotis (bounce of the waves off of the shoreline) made for confused, choppy waters. I remarked to Ralph that we might want to reconsider our plan, but he said that all we had to do was make it around Haines Point into Washington Channel and we'd be fine. This didn't really make sense to me in that, (a) even if we were protected in the channel, we'd still have to come back out into the soup to it home, and (b) the channel wasn't guaranteed to be calm (in fact, the area around Haines Point is often particularly choppy in these kinds of conditions). As we pressed on I had to make a decision - turn back and face the waves back to Gravely Point on my own, or stick with the safety of the group as it pressed on into worsening conditions. I decided that staying with the group was the better choice.
We pressed on for a while, making perhaps a half mile of forward progress, before Ralph finally decided to cut the trip short and head for home. He estimated the waves were around 2 feet at that point. While in terms of amplitude they were nothing like, say, Georgian Bay, they had a short period and seemingly random direction and so pushed us in all sorts of directions, as waves in the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay tend to do. We retraced our steps up the DC side of the river to the 14th Street Bridge, which (along with construction barges parked in the river for bridge work) gave us some cover from the wind. The ride back up to the bridge was challenging, but crossing the river in the lee of the bridge wasn't bad at all. Once we made it across we had to head back downriver to get to Gravelly Point, but interestingly, the water on the Virginia side of the river was much calmer. We could see whitecaps on the DC side, but we had only light to moderate chop. A little more excitement than expected, but it still beat fighting traffic to see the blossoms!
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| Getting ready to launch |
My second lateness isn't nearly as interesting. I just forgot my bike shoes when I left to meet someone for a bike ride (I was driving to a bike ride, something I hate doing) and had to double back to get them. The ride, though, was really cool. Many times I have ridden the Anacostia River Trail as far as Bladensburg, but had never before continued past it. Those of us who live in Washington's tonier suburbs sometimes consider PG County in Maryland to be the poor relation, but the county has some amazing bike trails! This was one of the prettier bike rides I've done in the DC area. Past Bladensburg we continued to parallel the river on the Northeast Branch Trail, riding through Northeast Stream Valley Park. The trail took us past the end of the runway at the tiny College Park Airport, and then finally we turned onto the Paint Branch Trail to Lake Artemesia Park. It's not a giant lake - maybe half a mile end to end - but it's a pretty park, and we rode the trail around the lake.
From there we bumbled our way into the town of College Park (GPS tried to take us through a chain link fence), where we got coffee at Vigilante Coffee. Being a lefty college town, the bathroom at Vigilante had several pieces of anti-Zionist graffiti. At least I initially thought it did, but when I looked a second time the writing turned out to be illegible, as if it had been scratched out with a key. Whatever one might have to say about their restrooms, their carrot muffin was delicious, and given that the ride was the day before Passover, I especially savored it knowing I was going into a week where I would be forbidden from eating decent baked goods.
We retraced our steps on the way home. This is a ride I definitely want to do again.
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