An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

After a hiatus last year I attended the Great Hudson River Revival, better known as the Clearwater Festival, this year. I have written about this festival before and so won't describe it at length here, but being a weekend filled with music, jam sessions, camping in a beautiful setting by the river, kayaking, lightweight hippie-dippiness and really good felafel, it hits a lot of high points for me. If only there was an on-site coffee roaster, it would be pretty much perfect :) This year I managed to convince a couple of my kayaking friends to attend, including Suzanne from Baltimore and Jen from the Adirondacks. The trip up was a logistical and traffic nightmare that I will not describe, except to say that it involved driving from Arlington to Baltimore, Baltimore to Manhattan, then Manhattan to Croton on Hudson, all in heavy traffic. Eventually, after about what seemed like ten days on the road, Suzanne and I (we carpooled) got there. Jen was already there, had her part o...

Because my schedule this summer is pretty busy with other things I haven't signed up for too many Chesapeake Paddlers Association camping trips. Fortunately, I had a free weekend to go on Ralph's Belle Isle trip. Belle Isle State Park is a pleasant little park right on the shores of the Rappahannock River in the Northern Neck of Virginia. Friday I made plans to carpool with Susan G. I was expecting her to show up at 9:30, but she was at my door at 9 AM. I guess there was a small miscommunication between us on timing, but no worries since I was just about ready anyway. I95 was a mess all the way down due to construction and the 2 1/2 hour trip wound up taking us 3 1/2 hours. We finally made it to the park at 1 PM, ate lunch and set up camp. The campsites at Belle Isle all have electric power. We didn't need it since the nights were cool, but we could have brought an air conditioner as well as an electric coffee maker and big screen TV. Alas, no WiFi - how primitiv...

I generally consider any weekend when I get to go kayaking to be a good weekend. By that criterion this must have been a pretty awesome weekend as I went on two, count em', two, excellent kayak trips.   First, on Sunday Tall Tom and I went out with our wives for a paddle - which is only a slightly less surprising a sentence to have written than, "Saturday I went over to the American Nazi Party headquarters for Shabbos services." The genesis of this spectacularly unexpected event was Tom's plan to twist his wife's arm into a kayaking outing. V has been making noises about wanting to do some kayaking and generally prefers doing things with "other people" (other than whom? Other than me, I suppose). V likes Tom's wife and so, when I presented her with the idea of a joint paddling outing she unexpectedly jumped at the idea. V on the water   We launched at Pohick Bay. Pohick on Memorial Day weekend has a warm nostalgia for m...