An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

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...