An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Sunday morning I had time for a kayak outing. I was looking for a change from my usual Columbia Island routine and so headed instead to Gravely Point, the next boat ramp down the Potomac. Gravely Point is distinguished by its location directly at the north end of the main runway of National Airport and so it's probably the loudest boat ramp in all of Virginia (unless maybe Oceana NAS has a ramp) . Gravely always has something of a party atmosphere, as it's always crowded with plane watchers, cyclists passing through on the Mt. Vernon trail, people who park there to enjoy the river views, picnickers, and boaters. I launched at about 9 AM. As jets roared overhead I headed directly across the Potomac, catching some boat wakes as I crossed the boat channel, then headed around Haines Point and up into the Anacostia. The Anacostia River feels much more like a typical urban river than does the Potomac. Its banks are concrete and rip-rap and its shores are lined with work...

Chapter 5: Asheville Cats After a stop in the quaint town of Waynesboro for lunch (where we savored some non-gloppy food) we rolled into Asheville at about 2 PM to find ourselves in the middle of Bele Chere, Asheville’s wild, free street festival. In fact, this is rumored to be the last Bele Chere, ending a 35 year run and so it was bigger and higher energy than even its usual state. While the coincidence of our Asheville visit with the festival was a happy accident, it was something I had discovered in advance and so I had booked us a room at a lovely boutique hotel within walking distance of the festival.  Air Dog Demo at Bele Chere Bele Chere is in some ways wilder than anything in DC – western North Carolina just has more people who let their freak flag fly, as it were, than does buttoned down DC (have you ever seen women walking around topless at the Alexandria Scottish Christmas walk? I thought not) and the beer was flowing freely. On the other hand, it had a m...

Chapter 1: Southwestward, Ho! Our journey into the Sow-uth begins with a nine hour drive from Arlington to Brasstown, North Carolina. We choose to break this trip up into two days and so we spend Saturday meandering down I-81, stopping in Lexington, Virginia for lunch. The spine of Virginia bristles with old towns which were thriving, if unremarkable, in the heyday of logging and railroads. Today they have maintained their unremarkability but with enough detectable quaintness to each merit an hour-long visit. David and I once spent a pleasant afternoon in Staunton during which we saw pretty much all the sights in town. On this trip Valerie and I stopped in Lexington, a town which is perhaps best known as the place where Stonewall Jackson served as an anonymous and eccentric college professor before achieving glory and immortality in the Civil War. Actually, Lexington boasts two colleges; however in late July it was, like most college towns, deserted. We ate lunch, browsed all three...