Biking with Petey

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, I had been hit with sciatica a couple of days prior. I was able to ride OK but didn't really want to push things, which meant we couldn't ride too far. What was really comical was mounting and unmounting the bike. My sciatica limited my ability to lift my leg up and swing it over the bike, so instead I had to lean the bike way over and kind of slide it up under me. Not graceful, but effective.

Anyway, we rode west. A little past Leesburg I started to get some twinges and so we turned around. On the way back we detoured through the historic downtown of Leesburg so he could see it (he was surprised at the Confederate statue, something I'm inured to by now), then stopped at Carolina Brothers for barbeque. Pete had eaten crabs in Maryland the night before, so I figured it was appropriate to give him a taste of another regional food. Which makes me wonder, if I visited him, what are the regional foods of New Jersey?

Along the way we caught up. He was actually in the area because his sister had an art opening at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. To get a feel for Wendy's art it's worth checking out this video. So I got the latest news about his sisters and his brother, and about Pete's life. He's currently contemplating a move from the world of Wall Street to someplace exotic - Thailand or Vietnam. Apparently these countries have active financial markets and a guy with Wall Street IT experience can get a job there and life high on the hog quite cheaply (Pete's finances took a hit in the economic downturns and because of personal life stuff). We also discussed cannabis as a future growth sector (no pun intended) and what the hot investments in that area are (our mutual friend, journalist Lisa Napoli, has written about this topic so I won't rehash it here). Buy low, sell high!

As a last stop on our outing we had a beer at Old Ox Brewery, which sits adjacent to the W&OD trail near Sterling, where Peter filled me in on the aging management techniques he's using (human growth hormone, DHEA, etc.). Sounds interesting, but maybe a little too far out for someone like me who is already running on replacement parts. Then it was back to the cars where we said a long goodbye - if he does indeed pick up and move to Thailand, who knows when and if I'll ever see him again! But it was good to catch up and take our first bike ride together since the "Breaking Away" era of the 70's.

Lake Champlain Part 3: The End

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 and Crab Islands also played an important role in the War of 1812 (known as that war you didn’t really learn much about in school except that’s how the White House got white and something about the Star Spangled Banner). The British assembled a massive army of 10,000 soldiers to invade the U.S. Their plan was to have their fleet push south first and take out the defending American naval forces, opening up a supply line down the lake for the army, which would then advance; however the American fleet managed to defeat the British, in part through luck and in part through clever planning. This was grisly stuff – the British naval commander was killed during the battle when a cannon on his ship broke loose and rolled over him, flattening him like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon. The American naval commander emerged unscathed despite being bonked in the head twice: once by a flying decapitated head and another by a large piece of rigging.

Landing at Crab Island

One of the monuments on Crab Island

Honoring the British war dead

Which all got me to thinking: this battle took place on a lake. How the heck did the British get a fleet of ships onto a lake? Well, it turns out the answer is that once they developed their battle plan they built the ships on site on the Canadian side of the lake (some of the parts were shipped pre-fab from England – like our wooden boat kits writ large!). Which shows you how much more slowly warfare moved in those days. More details here, if you’re interested.

We easily covered the three or so miles up to Crab Island. The island, which was used as a hospital during the battles, has monuments to the the men who fought and died in the battle - some of whom are buried on the island. We explored the trails of the rather small island (holy cow, I’ve never seen so much poison ivy!) then returned to the kayaks for lunch.

Reading the historical markers on Crab Island

Walking Crab Island

As I said, I wasn’t looking for a long paddle so Jen, Suzanne and decided to head straight back. Rob and Tom hatched a plan to detour back to the cars at the Peru Dock boat ramp and go on a beer run. We had joked before the trip that we would be so close to the cars that rather than cook for dinner we could go get pizza in Plattsburgh. We never did that, but this was one occasion where did take advantage of our proximity to civilization.

Jen, Suzanne and I wound up taking the long way around the island on the way back and so our “short” paddle was only a mile or so shorter than Rob and Tom’s “long” paddle. We piddled around the campsite a bit when we got back and were just heading out for our hike when Rob and Tom came into view on the water, boats laden with cold beer. Jen dropped out of the hike fairly quickly to return to camp and begin cooking dinner (she had graciously volunteered to take a second turn at cooking, which fended off our traditional last night ptomaine-a-thon, wherein we pool and eat all of our leftover food). It wasn’t easy to find the terminus of the trail near our campsite, but once we did we found a well-marked set of trails and Suzanne and I had a pleasant hike across to the other side of the island. Then we returned back to join in consumption of the hard-won beer.

Hiking on Valcour

Well-marked trail intersections on Valcour

Boy, cold beer a week into a kayak camping trip is a real luxury. Rob & Tom had brought back a dry bag full of ice to keep the beer cold and we all enjoyed kicking back with a couple of cold ones at the campsite on a warm, sunny afternoon. They told us of the adventure they had along the way - rescuing a kayaker who had gotten separated from her paddling partner and reuniting the two. Oh, and Rob brought back some awful desserts – packs of Twinkies and the like – to make up for a missed dessert on one of the previous evenings. 

We ate dinner (Jen’s gado gado), as we had been doing, up at the “½ campsite” which had a commanding view of our cove on one side and the lake on the other. Gado gado is an Indonesian dish of noodles with peanut sauce. The camping version was made with ramen and peanut powder. I cracked jokes about eating gado gado in Walla Walla or Baden Baden. No one laughed; perhaps they could tell that I was actually stealing the joke from a song in the old Fred Astaire musical Bandwagon. Anyway, after dinner we began the process of dismantling camp and then headed off to bed on our final night on the island.

Saturday

Amazingly, we were all packed and ready ahead of our agreed upon departure time and so we hit the water nice and early – into more chop, of course. It seemed like throughout the trip we hit the choppiest water when we our kayaks were heavily laden. Still, it was nothing we couldn't handle, just hard work to move the fully loaded boats through the waves. When we landed back at Peru Dock we executed the familiar dance of unpacking the kayaks into the cars. This is faster and easier than loading the kayaks but still takes a while. After we were all loaded Tom took off for home but the rest of us, longing for a lunch that wasn’t peanut butter or tuna packs, stopped for lunch at a diner in Ausable, NY. One thing about camping – it really makes you appreciate your normal life. It was wonderful to eat fresh food – and we all oohed and aahed over using an actual bathroom with running water. Hot running water!

Heading home in choppy water

My goal was to make it home in one day if possible and so about an hour into the trip (after passing through an unsettling Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint on the highway) I stopped at a Stewart’s (convenience store/ice cream chain) where I bought a vanilla milkshake and a caffeinated Diet Coke. Neither of these things are a regular part of my diet and so the combined sugar and caffeine rush hit me hard and had the desired effect: an energy buzz that lasted all the way to Maryland. Woo hoo! I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! Unfortunately, the combination also did a number on my stomach. While I was wide awake for the long drive, I didn’t make very good time as I had to make a few unscheduled restroom stops.

Checkpoint: Yo soy Americano, eh?

One last pretty sunset (I95 in Maryland)

It was great to get home and see Valerie, and it was nice to get home – for once – with dry gear that didn’t need to be hung up and aired out. My only gear casualty from the trip was a hole in one of the small lightweight dry bags I had bought for the trip. That’s better than Rob (chewed through Platypus bottles from his Manhattans plus four! other dry bags), Suzanne (chewed through food bag) or Tom (chewed through shower hose) did. I don’t think Jen lost any gear to the critters this time – she got a karmic break after having all her food stolen by a raccoon last year.


But we never got even a glimpse of Champ the sea monster.

Seeing Champ (artist's rendering)