An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

I was getting a little worried about March. I try to paddle at least once per month year-round. This year, despite the unusually cold and snowy winter, I managed to get out there in November, December, January and February. March was somehow slipping away, though. Unusual - March is usually when kayaking picks up steam. Well, I corrected that today. I met Tall Tom and Suzanne at the Brown's Bridge put-in on Rocky Gorge Reservoir, a spot chosen based on being equally inconvenient for all of us. By pure chance Tom merged onto I66 in Virginia just as I was passing by and so without having meant to the two of us wound up caravaning there. After a taste of 70-ish degree weather on Saturday, the slightly raw low 40's temperatures of Sunday felt mighty cold. That's the other reason (besides location) I chose Rocky Gorge - it's pretty well protected from the wind. Unfortunately, the reservoirs make for pretty uneventful paddling so I have not much to report: we did see a ba...

I almost backed out of this trip. Sure, a trip to the Adirondacks to see Jen and go skiing seemed like a good idea a few months ago. It had been a long winter since then, though, with the bitter cold of the polar vortex and snowstorm after snowstorm after snowstorm.By the time the week of the trip came around a trip to a winter wonderland no longer seemed like such a great idea. I did my best to passive aggressively wiggle my way out of it but Suzanne wasn't buying it - and so we went ahead with our plans. We met at Suzanne's house where we consolidated stuff into one car. Let me tell you some things about Suzanne's Subaru: to unlock it you insert a key into the door lock. After you unlock the door you have to open the door and click a button to unlock the other doors. To listen to music you have to insert something called a "CD" into the stereo. Now, this was all typical at one time but today these features seem as archaic as a crank starter - how quickl...

There's been a lot of discussion in my kayaking club lately about finding the right approach to the  entry-level kayaker. Are we a club for kayaking enthusiasts, and the heck with the newbies? Are we a club that's open to people who aspire to develop their skills and become kayaking enthusiasts? What about people who enjoy knocking around in kayaks but are happy not to progress any further? Someone used the expression "Big K K ayakers vs. Little k k ayakers" to differentiate between avid kayak enthusiasts and people with kayaks. I scratched my head over the "little k k ayakers" a bit (why wouldn't they want to grow into K ayakers?) until I thought about my relationship to cycling. I'm a guy with a bike (two actually) but not a Big C C yclist. While I was going on multi-day hostel-to-hostel cycling trips and knew how to rebuild a bottom bracket before most of the Spandex-clad jerks I see on the bike trail were born, I don't have the cute outfits...