An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

 Day 8 I'm going to be a little short here, since I've spent so much time writing about Scotland. We arrive in London early Saturday morning having slept somewhat fitfully on the train. We take the tube from Euston Station to Victoria, where we put our bags in the "Left Luggage". Our plan is to spend the day on a double-decker sight-seeing bus but it soon starts teeming rain. We get soaked at our first stop, Buckingham Palace, where they cancel the ceremony of the Changing of the Guard because of the rain (for a rainy country, England is poorly adapted to rainy days). We do a little more sight-seeing on foot but don't feel like waiting on "queues" in the rain and so after lunch (more pizza!) we go to our hotel to dry off. The hotel is quite civilized - bathrobes, TV in the tub, mini-bar. Ted creates an impressive clothesline web in the bathroom where we dry our wet kayaking gear, which has been stuffed into our bags since the day before. Fortunately,...

Day 5 Today we got to paddle without taking a long drive first. Ele promised us 7 minutes to the put-in (the jetty, that is) and sure enough we were there in exactly that. We did a shuttle, starting on Loch Moidart and ending back at the inn. This was our longest day (about six hours on the water) and had a lot of highlights. First of all, the scenery was striking. Second, we stopped off at the ruins of a 13th century castle, Castle Tioram. Like everything in Scotland, Castle Tioram has a link to Bonnie Prince Charlie, a romantic figure from the 18th century who led the unsuccessful Jacobite Rebellion - an attempt to overthrow the Hanovers and return the more British Stuarts to the throne of England. The rebellion met its end at the Battle of Culloden, the location of which we passed on our taxi ride from the Inverness airport. I reckon Bonnie Prince Charlie, a valiant crusader for a failed cause, occupies a place in Scottish hearts similar to that occupied by the Confederacy among ...

Day 3 This was our first full day of paddling. The day started with breakfast, both cold (cereals, yoghurt and prunes, of course toast) and hot (black pudding, ham, poached egg and sausage or haddock). We then all loaded into the van for about an hour’s drive to a put-in, including getting mildly lost along the way. Apparently GPS is unknown in the Highlands; the guides did everything the old fashioned way, with big fold-out maps and educated guesses. Our paddle was, like the day before, on Loch Sunart, but much closer to the mouth of the loch – hence the long drive. We spent about five hours on the water, circumnavigating the Isle of Oronsay. Boy, it was gorgeous. Both green and rocky. Surprisingly clear water. And lots of sea life: seals, sea otters, terns, golden herons. While we were closer to the open sea, it was still a pretty calm environment, except when the wind kicked up at the end. We were paddling somewhere around here . Every day our lunch was provided by the inn. ...

We arrive in Inverness to find everyone in a bit of a tizzy. Inverness is playing host to the Scottish Open golf tournament, except for the past two days it has been pouring rain and the golf has been canceled. This seems to affect everyone. Even our taxi driver was supposed to have been marshaling at the tourney but instead found himself behind the wheel like a regular work day. Mrs. McRae, at whose B&B we stayed, reported in her Scottish  brogue that there'd even been a thunderrrrstorrrrm, with forrrrrked  lightening. As a DC area resident I thought nothing of this until I learned that thunderstorms are rare in the cool, high latitudes of the Scottish Highlands. After hearing The McRae's rather long list of rules (don't bump your suitcase up the stairs; no carryout food on the premises; don't leave the bathroom light on all night the way those Portugese people did the other week as the fan noise bothers the other guests, you must pay cash as  credit card machine...

I've been learning to ride a bike. Not the basic part of moving forward without falling down: I mastered that years ago. Rather, with the winding down of my running career I've been looking to cycling as a new form of exercise and have been trying to do some rides of at least moderate length. I have an unrealistic possible goal of riding the metric version of the Seagull Century (100 km, or about 62 mi) this fall; more realistically, I just want to build up my cycling muscles and, um, seat tolerance. At 18.5 mi today's ride was not one of my longer ones, however it offered lots of hill practice. I started from home, peddled up Sycamore St./Williamsburg Blvd./Glebe Rd. to Chain Bridge. This part of the ride has lots of fun ups and downs over extended hills. To give you some idea, the GPS shows my speed alternating between speeds as high as 27 MPH as I motored downhill and as low as 8 MPH as I granny-geared my way back uphill. From studying the map I found a little trick de...