An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

A little less than 150 years ago bullets were flying over the spot where we launched. Union and Confederate forces stood arrayed on opposite sides of the Rappahannock River in what would ultimately be a brutal defeat for Burnside's army at the hands of Robert E. Lee. Today, nary a ghost of that time stirred as Tom and I arrived for our trip up the Rappahannock. A group of us had accepted our friend Paige's invitation to come down his way, spend some time on the water, then check out his new house. Paige frequently makes the trek to DC to kayak with us, and we really owed him a return visit. Tom and I, carpooling, arrived early, so we spent a little time driving around and checking out historical markers around the town. We headed back to the dock just as the rest of our group arrived - Dave and Cyndi, Nelson (without Caroline, who was sick), Kingsley, and Paige. In not time flat we were zipped up into our cold weather gear and were on the water. The river had a pretty strong cu...

I started today with a dilemma - erg or run. I really wanted some time on the rower, because I needed that kind of workout, but with the end of the deep winter chill, the outside beckoned. The answer? My own little biathlon. I did about 2/3 of my normal workout on the erg, then threw on a jacket and did about 2/3 of my normal run. An invigorating and challenging way to start the day. I was sipping a cup of coffee after cleaning up when Ted comes running in. "A new geocache just got published right near the Wilson Boulevard McDonalds," he shouted, waving a printout. Now, being the first to find a newly placed geocache is something of an honor - sometimes the hider will even put a little prize inside for the finder. Some people are real First-to-Find (FTF) chasers. We tend not to be, since I rarely care to drop everything and run out to a cache. This one, though, was too good to pass up, being less than two miles from home in an area we knew well. The cache had been published e...