An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Over time this has become a blog of my musical as well as outdoor adventures, so I figured a post about recent gigs won't be out of place. A couple of weeks ago my phone rang at about 6 PM on a Friday. "This is Bob - what're you doing tonight?" said the voice at the other end. It turns out Bob was hanging out with Cletus*, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of a band that was scheduled to play at a local bar that night - but without their usual keyboard player, who was out of town. Bob suggested me as a fill-in. As it happened, I was free, and so a gig was born! Being an on-time person, I showed up at the time Cletus had said to arrive and found I was the first band member there. I sat down at the bar and ordered a beer and soon enough the rest of the band trickled in. I went up and introduced myself to Cletus (who I recognized because I had seen him play before). We chatted for a little bit but he kept calling me "Joey". I thought maybe he just has a ...

Let's start by settling punctuation: Veteran's vs. Veterans' vs. Veterans Day. Judd, the leader of today's Veterans Day ride, works for the Veterans Administration and says that according to their official style guide there is no apostrophe. The day doesn't belong to Veterans; rather, it is a day in honor of Veterans. Now you know. I left home at around 9 AM to bike to Velo Cafe at The Wharf in DC, the starting point of the ride. At that time of the morning it was quite cold - my first ride of the season with temps in the thirties. I dressed warmly and so was comfortable - of course, with the exception of my hands which were cold despite gloves, glove liners, and little chemical warmer packets. I spent about the first half of the trip into DC obsessing about how my hands were going to hurt all day. Fortunately, in the second half of the trip I distracted myself with another train of thought and, since I wasn't focusing on them, my hands didn't bother me as...

Just a quick entry to note that the CPA Pirates of Georgetown marked the end of yet another paddling season with a pleasant kayak outing (in sunny but windy-as-heck conditions) followed by lunch at Sine in Pentagon Row. It's hard to believe it, but next year will be the group's 20th anniversary. I've been paddling with the group ever since it was founded as the Georgetown River Rats in 1999. That's a lot of trips up and down the Potomac! It was particularly nice to have some of the PoG old-timers there, including Jen, who was visiting from out of town. Sunday's group (minus Yvonne) The original River Rats logo Photo from 2002. Two of the people in this photo (plus me!) were on Saturday's trip

A bunch of my cycling friends participate in The Great Pumpkin Ride out in Warrenton every year. While the ride, which is always just before Halloween, encourages costumes, in practice most riders come as they are or at most decorate their helmets with pumpkins and such. Not my friends - they go all out, with a group theme every year. Last year it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which even included someone dressed as a pizza (in case you don't know, the TMNT love pizza). The year before that it was some children's show with gnomes riding foxes - I'm not familiar with the show, but Leo, who is quite artistic, made very impressive cardboard foxes which integrated with the bike frames so it really looked like the cyclists were riding the foxes. This year's theme was the Nintendo Mario Brothers games. Now, despite the fact that I used to publish  articles  in game development magazines (back when such magazines still existed - real, printed on paper magazines!), I...

I don't write about cycling as much as kayaking because let's face it, bicycling is boring. Or maybe it's just my version of cycling, which is largely confined to a set of trails around my house. It's easy to get lazy when you can roll out the door onto an extensive trail network. I realized this when my old friend Peter (we know each other back to junior high school!) visited recently. Pete's gotten into cycling of late and wanted to do a ride together. When I mentioned riding a trail his reply was, "I don't mountain bike," at which point I had to explain to him the notion of a rail trail. It turns out that where he lives (somewhere in New Jersey) there are no bike trails. All his riding is on the road. Maybe I would find cycling more interesting if I ditched the local trails and went more places. Anyway, it was great to see Peter - we rarely see each other since we live far apart. We met up at the Rt. 28 parking lot for the W&OD. Unfortunately,...

Friday I could tell my neck was still tight when I woke up on Friday. I’ve had this issue before – it’ll spasm and then be hard as a rock and painful for days. In the previous section of this write-up I referred to it as trapezius pain but after a little web searching I think the offending muscle might be the levator scapulae - not that it matters for the purposes of the blog. Whatever muscle it was, it was still bothering me and so I wasn’t up for risking a recurrence of the previous day's stabbing pains. When kayaker Shawn visited he mentioned that Valcour Island was interesting to hike around – like many place that today are parkland, it had been inhabited at one time and there were various ruins around the island. So, we decided to do a short paddle to Crab Island and then come back and do some hiking. This area played a significant role in the early days of the U.S. I’ve already mentioned the Revolutionary War battle of Valcour Island. Well, the area around Valcour a...

Tuesday Suzanne and I are early risers in the group so it was no surprise when I bumped into her at the stroke of 6 AM at the coffee pot in the hotel breakfast room (my kind of camping breakfast!). Jen followed close behind and I soon found myself engaged in a scintillating conversation about their cats – and how to steal the bananas back from the table of Germans who were monopolizing them. Eventually Tom and Rob joined us and the Germans left, solving both our conversational and fruit challenges. We made plans to head to Peru Dock, from whence we would launch to Valcour Island. “Ahh, Valcour Island,” you say. “Isn’t that the site of a Revolutionary War naval battle?” Why, yes, it is. American forces under the command of Benedict Arnold (still a good guy at this point in the war!) managed to get shot to pieces by a superior British fleet before limping away. Like many Revolutionary War battles, the Americans didn’t exactly win but managed to do damage to the British by slowing...

Pre-trip Every trip starts with a trip to get to the trip. Sometimes we travel together, but this time each and every one of us drove separately. I was held up at work and so my journey started a little later than planned which led to me having to slog through afternoon rush hour. I covered only 50 miles in my first two hours of driving – ugh. Eventually the road opened up and I cruised through the forgettable landscape of central Pennsylvania. I had hoped to make it to New Paltz, the site of many fond if fuzzy memories from years ago, but given the traffic delays I made it only as far as Scranton, which left me five hours of driving to do on Friday. I got an early start and had no problem making it to my planned rendezvous with Jen (describing it that way sounds more suspicious than it was) on Friday at Peru Dock on the New York side of the lake. The plan had been that we’d leave my car at Peru Dock and another car at Kamp Kill Kare in Vermont so that in case of bad weather (whi...