An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

To celebrate my friend Jen's milestone birthday a group of us decided to join her in paddling from Fletcher's Boathouse in DC down to Belle Haven Marina south of the Wilson Bridge. This 13 mile trip is not exactly "bucket list" material, but it's unusual to do the whole stretch at once (we chose to do a one way trip with a car shuttle return) and was a good choice given the vagaries of March weather and our beginning-of-season level of endurance. For better or for worse (and it really was a little of both) my car wasn't one of the ones being left at the Belle Haven end and so I was able to get a slightly later start and meet the group at Fletcher's. Weather made the trip iffy until the last minute (thunderstorms in the forecast). I didn't get my stuff together until Saturday morning and so didn't really think through that I'd need my change of clothes at the Belle Haven end, where I wouldn't have my car. Fortunately I realized this in tim...

I am leery of Meetup groups. For one thing, they tend to skew towards a young demographic. For another, whatever their stated purpose, many of them seem to have an undercurrent of being singles groups. Two new groups popped up recently, each of which explicitly countered at least one of these concerns and which therefore caught my interest. One is an outdoor activities group for "experienced life veterans", that is to say, middle-aged people. That group had a bike ride this weekend. My family forgot that I had signed up for this event and scheduled me to do other things at the same time - notably, to pick David up from his SAT (no worries - family comes first). So, I'll have to defer until later to report on this Meetup. Great Falls The second group is called "Mindful Yogi Hikers" and hosts events which combine yoga, meditation, and hiking - exactly my cup of chai tea. The organizer of the group is a guy my age, married with three kids, so I figured at wo...

Last weekend I had a choice: attend the kayaker group planning meeting or go to the NOVAGO (geocaching) winter event with Ted. I'm starting to get a little wistful about Ted's imminent departure for college; there won't be too many more of these chances to do little outings together. So ... I opted for Ted and NOVAGO. It was a cold February morning. We arrived at Burke Lake Park to find the event well underway. The funny thing is that everyone was crammed into a too small pavilion. It was like a rush hour subway train. I think people were huddled in there to get a little protection from the cold, not that a picnic shelter provides much in that regard. Part of the event was a geocaching bike ride around the lake. My bike isn't capable of handling dirt trails, but fortunately we have a free el cheapo mountain bike which came free when we adopted our lizard Cooper (long story). So, after schmoozing with the cachers for a while Ted and I set out with some others. He and...