An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

The range of nature you can see from the urban Potomac is quite amazing. Thursday night's PoG kayak outing was called off due to thunderstorms. I left my boat on the car when I got home figuring that, Friday being a day off for me, I'd spend some time on the river in the morning. I launched from Columbia Island at about 7 AM and headed upriver towards Fletcher's Cove. It was a pretty morning and needless to say, I soon spotted the "usual suspects" of nature - ducks (with cute ducklings!), great blue herons, geese and cormorants. Swan on the Potomac Roosevelt Island Deer Things started to get even better when I spotted a single mute swan off of Roosevelt Island. I paddled over to get a closer look. The swan was not bothered by my presence and continued feeding. After spending some time enjoying its grace and power, I started back upstream and almost immediately spotted several deer feeding by the shoreline on Roosevelt Island. I got a pretty good look a...

Today I participated in my first group cycling ride ever. Looking for something different than just riding the Arlington Loop by myself, I sought out a group ride through Potomac Pedalers and wound up riding the Arlington Loop with a bunch of other people. Unfortunately, I'm a slow rider and so am limited to the slower organized rides. Such rides draw geezers and casual cyclists. I showed up  and - surprise! - it was mostly a bunch of alter kocker guys, mixed with a few casual riders on hybrid bikes. One guy immediately launched into warning us to be careful out on the trail for dogs and children because they do their best to jump in front of cyclists and cause accidents. And there you have it: the cyclist mentality. There are two types of people in the world: cyclists, and people who are in the way of cyclists. Thank you for that piece of advice, Mr. Cyclist, and may I compliment you on how your tight cycling jersey highlights your enormous gut? There were some nice people ...

Meetups will eventually be the death of traditional clubs like the Chesapeake Paddlers Association. I’ve said it before and it was amply demonstrated by this event.  Some folks have been agitating for greater water access in Anne Arundel County. There are parks on the bay which, while publicly funded and officially "public", have traditionally been accessible only by those in the immediate neighborhood who have the key/combination to get in. This really isn't right, and recently there have been some successes in opening these parks to the public. One success story in this area is Beverly-Triton Park, which is now open and which is a great launch point for a paddle out to Thomas Point lighthouse. Access to nearby Mayo Beach Park is a work in progress – it’s currently open to the public just a few days per year. This past Saturday was one of those days and so a group was organized to show that there’s public interest in the park. Some of us launched out of Beverly...

I was teleworking on Bike to Work Day. That circumstance would initially seem to preclude participating in biking to work. Mathematics to the rescue! It is well known that if you travel in a circle you eventually wind up back where you started (Valerie could prove this, I'm sure). So, if I were to go out for a bike ride that was, say, a loop I would wind up back where I started, riding to my home office from my home home, allowing me to bike to work. How fortunate for me that the bike-lovers who run Arlington sustain a loop trail known as the "Arlington Loop" and that I can access said loop easily from my house. Riding the Arlington Loop had two additional benefits. First, it's the bike ride I have done far more often than any other over the past two decades. It is my Steely Dan Aja of bike rides (Aja is an album I've pretty much memorized over 35 years of listening - it's always what I use for test listening to new audio equipment - it's the first CD ...

Test Ride 2: Errands Since I am set on becoming more of a bicycle person I figured I should try doing some local errands by bike. I wanted to stop by the garden center to discuss some landscaping I'm thinking of having done. Remember how I said in my last post that I needed some more practice with the clip-in pedals before I'd feel comfortable out on the streets? Well, forget I said that. The destination for my second outing involved riding through Seven Corners, a traffic-choked mega-intersection near my house. The good news is that it went without a hitch. In fact, this ride was not very eventful, so I'll summarize it in brief: rode down Roosevelt St. past the cemetery. On the streets I missed my nice, big bar-end mirror, and was using a tiny helmet mirror  instead. I was so busy fiddling with the helmet mirror that I forget to pedal on an uphill and almost toppled over.  Speaking of hills, jeez, the local streets are both really hilly and full of potholes - ...