An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

A little write-up of my trip to New York. Every year a group of my high school friends gets together for dinner in Manhattan around holiday time. I try to attend when I can, and this year the stars aligned well: I was overdue to visit with my brother, and the weekend of the high school "Duck Night" dinner (so named because it's held at a Chines restaurant called Peking Duck) was the same weekend as my brother's birthday. I took the bus up to New York, something I hadn't tried before. It probably took me an hour longer in each direction than driving would have, but I didn't have to worry about having a car in New York and at $30 each way it was cheaper than driving. I took an early bus so that I could make it to New York in time to grab lunch and see a matinee of a Broadway show before heading out to Brooklyn.  I had recently bought Valerie some really pricey tickets to see John Groban, which made me feel a little less guilty about treating myself to a ti...

Just a quick report on a marathon day of music on Saturday. I had two gigs back-to-back - I must be a professional musician :) The first gig was a holiday party. The basic outlines are pretty normal - nice ballroom at the Sheraton Pentagon City. Great views out towards DC and Virginia. Extensive buffet and open bar. Then there was the host. Rob is an ostensibly extremely wealthy dude who spends most of his time in the Virgin Islands but still has connections back here. He cuts quite a figure at these parties - tuxedo, spats, a hairstyle that could be described as the Donald Trump look with a ponytail. Quite a dude. And he has interesting musical requests: he always wants a sing-along of corny traditional songs (Oh Susanna, Yankee Doodle, and such) as well as a medley of the Armed Services songs. Last year we played the service songs; this year they went with a recorded version. Plus, Rob has a hearing disorder which makes him hypersensitive to loud noise. So he hires live entertainme...

The bicycling community has a lot of cutesy ideas and affectations, most of which I ignore. But there is this thing to ride your age in miles on your birthday. Well, my birthday turned out to be a nice weather day (for late November) and my recollection was that my calendar was empty, so on the spur of the moment I decided to blow off work and do a fifty-seven mile bike ride. As always, I chose the default, lazy route - hopping on the W&OD bike trail, which passes within a few blocks of my house, and just riding 28 1/2 miles out, then turning around and riding 28 1/2 miles bake. Or thereabouts - that distance takes me to the eastern outskirts of Leesburg, and just a little further gets you to a shopping center with a Dunkin' Donuts and a Starbucks. Given that it was a bit chilly I figured I might enjoy a coffee break at my turnaround point. At about 10:30 AM, about eight miles short of my planned turnaround I stopped to use the Porta-potty at Smith's Switch Station (the o...

One of the challenges with being a wildly popular blogger is that sometimes your fans come up to you on the street and beg you to write about their favorite subjects. This happened to me most recently at Columbia Island when one of my biggest fans asked me to write about my recent trip to Chincoteague. The origin of this trip really goes back to 2014 when I was part of group trip to Chincoteague . This led to a return to Chincoteague , this time with spouses, in 2016. That trip was a lot of fun for just about everyone - though not so much so for Valerie, whose mom was fatally ill (she died just days after the trip). Still, the experience of getting everyone including significant others together was so enjoyable that we vowed to do it again. Life got in the way for a while, but I eventually orchestrated a follow-on group get-together, this one a combination of paddling and bluegrass music at Claytor Lake/Floyd, VA. At the end of that trip we started thinking about the next follow-on ...

So, let me tell you about a really boring bike ride I took on the Capital Trail in Williamsburg, VA - but first, let me tell you about my cousins because that's an interesting, almost unbelievable story. I have a very small family. I think as a result of this paucity of family connection I occasionally get a bee in my bonnet to search for distant relative online. Typically I've focused on my mother's side - a family with such a long history in Jerusalem that they've been the subject of an exhibition at an Israeli History Museum . Any number of people crow online about this family connection, making them easy to track down. One day, though, it dawned on me that there's a branch of my father's family that changed the spelling of their last name, essentially making up a new last name. I figured that an online search of the last name would have to turn up some hits of relatives. Sure enough, searching that name yielded very few results. On Facebook there were th...

If you've read the first four parts of the Georgian Bay story you should be well prepared for this quiz: 1. Our trip back to Chikanishing featured a) Wind b) More Wind c) Exceptionally Strong wind d) a, b & c Answer key: 1. d Yes, our last day of paddling was once again a windy one. Winds peaking at about 28 MPH, with gusts well into the 30's, coming from due west (so again, right in our faces for most of the trip) and channeled through the narrow inlet to make the wind seem even stronger. The kind of wind where you keep looking at the shore to reassure yourself that you're actually moving forward. The kind of wind where you don't dare miss a paddle stroke for fear of losing what little forward momentum you have. This was small craft advisory bordering on gale force stuff, and on a regular day it's the kind of weather where I'd stay home. No longer hyper-concerned about conserving phone battery power, I was running Strava and so have a track fi...

Day 8 (Thurs) : Readers of this adventure already know that wind is the defining element of paddling on Georgian Bay. The forecast for Thursday through Saturday was unsettling enough to catch the attention of even a non-worrier like me. I thought it might be prudent to return to the put-in early ahead of the weather; however that idea was dead on arrival when presented to the larger group. So, off we went into a few more days of wind and rain. Thursday was our biggest move of the trip, from the southern side of Phillip Edward Island around the east side, up Beaverstone Bay and then around the top of the island into Collins Inlet. I apologize to readers of this blog that there are a confusingly large number of bays to remember. All along we were in Georgian Bay (big), but were paddling through many smaller bays formed by Phillip Edward Island. The best I can suggest is that the curious reader peruse the map. We packed the boats and said goodbye to our sweet "Limerick" camp...