An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Thursday 9/14 With only two days left of paddling, we decided to do another long outing: a trip through the Navy Islands and Raft Narrows to the Thousand Islands Bridge. This was another nice trip even though the outbound portion was my least favorite bit of paddling on the trip. Knowing that this was going to be another trip with long miles and strong currents, the night before the trip we had a group discussion. Since I was a little slower than the rest of the group, to some extent all week I had felt like when we were on the water I had to just paddle, paddle, paddle to keep up with the group. No stopping to catch my breath or take photos. Limited quick sips of water and no snack breaks. And still, I always felt a half step or so behind the group. I asked if we could take breaks every once in a while. Likewise, Rob requested that we stop occasionally so he could stretch his back. With two of the six of us requesting breaks, of course the response was that the remainder of the grou...

Monday, 9/11 Monday was going to be one of our long days - a paddle to Boldt Castle. This meant paddling the length of Grenadier Island and then island hopping to the castle on Heart Island, for a total of about fifteen miles round trip. Jen had really wanted to go to Boldt Castle, and I did too. There is family lore about a family vacation visit to Boldt Castle when I was young. As a child I had my share of irrational phobias. As the tale is told, I spent our entire time at Boldt Castle fretting about missing the boat back to the mainland and pleading to go "back to the boat dock" as soon as possible. As it happens, I recently had some old home movies digitized including, as it happens, footage from our trip to the Thousand Islands. In the film I appear to be having a perfectly fine time at the castle. I don't doubt that my fears of getting marooned there were real, but I suspect my insistence on waiting at the dock for the tour boat has been magnified over years of re...

Friday 9/8 One of the nice things about a trip like this is the planning and coordination up front. We're all experienced at this sort of trip and we all have a lot of gear, so there's a lot of good back and forth in the months and weeks leading up to the trip as we choose routes and campsites, decide who is going to bring what, and so forth. This year the planning phase was extra-special for me as much of it took place while I was recovering from surgery. Visualizing the trip and watching the details crystallize helped motivate me as I worked to get my strength back. Suzanne wisely suggested that I take on the job of figuring out places to paddle and so during my convalescence I scoured the available literature, pored over Google Earth, planned out plenty of paddling options, created a color-coded Google map with all our options, and created a file people could load into their GPS receivers with locations (waypoints) for all of our destinations. By the time I headed out from...

My brother and sister-in-law have been working for years on a a show - his music, her script. After many years of working to get all the pieces in place they finally got a production in New York. Needless to say, the dates of the limited run overlaid the dates of my Thousand Islands trip, meaning the only way I was going to get to see it was on the way either to or from the trip. So, the day before I would otherwise have left for the kayak trip I managed to cram all my gear, plus Ted and David, into my car and head north. I had made reservations at a hotel in Newark, NJ - which had parking for oversize vehicles (I had a kayak on the roof of my car), easy access to Manhattan via the PATH train, and was on the right side of the city for a quick getaway the following morning. The oversize parking turned out to be at a lot a block away. With some trepidation I left my car with my week's worth of camping and kayaking gear under the care of the skells  working there and the boys and I he...

So, I played a nice festival called Not Fade Away last weekend. As one might expect from the name, it was a festival of Buddy Holly aficionados. Just kidding. The name is a Grateful Dead reference (according to Wikipedia, the Dead performed the song 532 times) and the festival was suitably hippie dippie. VW buses and Vanagons as far as the eye could see! A lot of Dead and Dead-inspired music, jam band music, and one Classic Funk Band. That would be us - Magnolia Blue. Here I am Onstage We performed with a couple of extra horns - five pieces in all - which was cool. Unfortunately, we're without a female singer right now and with Shade having left the band, Cornelius has to shoulder all the singing. He's a great front man, but that's a lot of singing for his pipes. Fortunately, we were able to compensate by throwing in a number of instrumentals (or near instrumentals). During our set, apparently there was a scuffle between someone (we think he had wandered over ...