New York

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 ticket to Hamilton (expensive, but still $100 less expensive than Josh Groban!). Amazingly, a couple of single seats to this extremely popular show were available days before the performance - I snapped up a seat in the second row of the balcony, which was sure to afford me a good view unless someone with a head like Mr. Met sat down in front of me - which is of course exactly what happened.

The bus leaves you off near Penn Station - a very familiar neighborhood for me, as it is where my dad's/grandfather's office was, and I worked at Penn Plaza when I was in college. My first action was to drop off my suitcase so I didn't have to schlep it to the theater. After 9/11 the Port Authority did away with baggage storage lockers at Penn Station, so private businesses have taken over bag storage. Not that there are bag storage businesses per se; rather other businesses now store bags. I dropped my back at Jason Office Supply on 31st St. How it works is that they give you a numbered tag to place on your bag and have you take a picture of it. When you come to pick up your bag you show them the bag and the photo to prove you're grabbing the right bag. Storage isn't exactly secure - the suitcases are all just sitting in a back corner of the store, not locked up in any way, but the tagging offers some security. Payment is based on the length of time you have the bag stored, which is driven not by an app but by a web site where you start and stop a timer. That part doesn't work perfectly. Two weeks after my trip I got an email from the bag storage company saying my timer was still running and asking if I had retrieved my bag. The good news is that there was no hassle when I told them what time I picked up my bag, and they charged me accordingly.

Having dropped my bag off, I walked uptown and grabbed lunch at Ben's Deli. Now, Ben's is not one of the classic been-there-forever New York delis, but the food is quite good and it's in the theater district and was the only deli I had time to get to before curtain time. I eat red meat very, very rarely, only on special occasions - the opportunity to get genuine New York deli pastrami counts as a special occasion (my other two red meat meals this year were sampling a Vietnamese colleague's homemade pho soup, and a burger after I got back from my Georgian Bay trip). I ordered chicken soup with a kneidel (matzoh ball) and a half sandwich - "half sandwich" being the deli term for "normal sized sandwich". Delicious! Having so feasted I continued on to the theater - again on foot.

A "half sandwich"

Hamilton!

What show did I see? Hamilton! It lived up to its reputation, though I have to say I'm glad I listened to the score in advance. There's no spoken dialog; the show is entirely in song, and most of that song is rap. It can be a little hard to understand. Hearing it in advance helped. Overall, it was great (at least what I could see of it around Mr. Met's head was). The quality of performances in New York productions is just a cut above, as is the whole of the production - choreography, sets, etc. A really good time.

As I started walking back down to retrieve my bag I realized I had somehow lost my scarf so I ducked into Macy's Herald Square to see if I could pick up a replacement. I was looking at a nice wool/cashmere scarf when a salesman came over and said, "Can I pay for that for you?" Then, realizing what he had said he laughed and said, "No, what I meant was can I ring that up for you?" He and I wound up joking about it, then talking about the holiday season and how we're both in the Hannukah camp holidaywise. He wound up giving me 30% off the price of the scarf - which is a good thing, because it was kind of expensive.

I picked up my bag and hopped on the F train to Brooklyn. Time between boarding the train and the first time a homeless person tried to hit me up for money? About 10 seconds. I love New York! Actually, the ride out to Brooklyn went without a hitch. I exited the train at Church Avenue (two stops north of the 18th Avenue Station, where people are seen fleeing in terror in the trailer from the recent Joker movie). This is my brother's neighborhood of Kensignton, which sits at the intersection of a Bangladeshi Muslim neighborhood, an ultra-religious Jewish neighborhood, a gentrified neighborhood with olive oil shops and gourmet coffee shops, and good old middle class Brooklyn - a typically New York crazy admixture of cultures. I wasn't staying with my brother - his apartment is already too full of people, dogs and stuff. Instead, I had booked an AirBnB in the Bangladeshi side of the neighborhood (though the host was Chinese). On looking at the building, an old two story multi-unit row house, I wasn't impressed. I walked in to a hallway filled with dozens of pairs of shoes all wrapped up in bags, and cracker boxes pinned to the walls as mailboxes. Hmmm ... Brooklyn hospitality is unique. Fortunately, the unit itself was quite nice, if a little bare bones. Quite clean, with Ikea-level furnishings. A full one bedroom apartment with kitchenette. Other than a very thin mattress, it was fine.

Creative mailboxes

What's up with the shoes and suitcases?

I visited with Henry and Colleen for a while, but I was pretty spent, as I had been on the go since 6:30 AM. Also, I was recovering from an intense if short-lived flu or bronchitis or something. I crashed and slept soundly.

When I got up Thursday I started my day by grabbing coffee and a bagel from a Bangladeshi corner bodega (only in New York would I refer to a convenience store run by Bangladeshis by the Spanish term "bodega", and only in New York would a South Asian convenience store sell bagels). I went for a run. I went down Ocean Parkway (America's first bike path) then across into my old neighborhood, past my childhood home, then back. I was pretty stiff from a day spent sitting cramped into the bus and a small theater seat, and my lingering bronchitis was aggravated by breathing out in the cold - but somehow I slogged my way through a jog. Then I went over to Henry and Colleen's. We didn't do much of anything. Just visited. Walked over and got lunch at Batata, a rather delicious Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant, then lingered over coffee at Windsor Coffee. Yeah, chains have infiltrated Brooklyn to some extent and I'm sure there's a Starbucks somewhere (there's a Dunkin' Donuts in the heart of Bangladeshi Kensington!), but fortunately it's still mostly a world of local shops. Thursday evening I met my friend Charles - my oldest friend and my only friend left in Brooklyn - for coffee and dessert at a diner. That required a very expensive Uber (Ubers are pricey in New York due to some living wage law) but was money well spent.

My childhood home

Friday was Henry's birthday. We had plans to go out for brunch. Unfortunately, the place we had hoped to go (Hamilton's on Ft. Hamilton Parkway - named after, yes Alexander Hamilton) didn't serve brunch on weekdays so we wound up at a slightly less grand restaurant - but the food was still delicious.

In the afternoon I bid farewell to my family and took the subway back into Manhattan, getting off the train along the way to grab a picture at Astor Place - a station that figures in a song I wrote back in the 80's. I had booked a hotel in the city for Friday night. My room wasn't ready yet when I got there but I dropped my bags and went for a walk through the heart of New York Christmas - the tree at Rockefeller Center and the store windows on Fifth Avenue. It's very nostalgic for me. My grandparents lived in this neighborhood (up the street from Trump Tower!) and we always did this walk at Christmastime, ending up at FAO Schwartz toy store, which was an amazing place to visit as a kid). Sigh. Eventually I made it to my hotel and after waiting some more - and eventually throwing a fit at the front desk - I got into my room.

Rockefeller Center tree

Fifth Avenue

Bergdoff's store window (can you find the accordion?)

So nice to be somewhere where Gen. Sherman is considered a hero!

Duck Night dinner was wonderful as always. There's a core group that's always there, but there are also always surprises. There were a couple of people there I hadn't seen in person since high school. It was super cool to reconnect. The dinner always goes by quickly. We go out for drinks afterward. That goes quickly too. I stumbled back to my room around midnight.

Duck Night crew

Saturday morning I walked over to Ess-a-Bagel (Yiddish for "Eat a Bagel") on 3rd Avenue, where for breakfast I got a truly quality bagel and veggie cream cheese and a true New York "soup Nazi" ordering experience. Then I hopped the E train downtown and caught the bus home. Unlike on the ride up, the bus was fairly empty which made the ride a little more comfortable - but I still wound up a little queasy by the time I reached Arlington. Maybe long distance bus travel isn't for me.

Bagel!

Anyway, a great trip - family, old friends, bagels and pastrami ... but no pizza. Gotta leave something for next time.

Eleven Hours of Music

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 entertainment then spends the whole time shushing the musicians.

Anyway, despite all this, it was a fun gig. A lot of hours, though: we played from 4 to 8:30. I was giving Vicky, the singer of Magnolia Blue, a ride out to the next gig. She met me at Rob's party - sauntered in aroudn 8 PM, ordered a whiskey like she belonged there and got some dessert. With only the tiniest bit of prompting she joined us onstage. The last couple of songs were really nice duets between Vicky and Zac. Then she and I had to skeddadle - we were due out in Ashburn for our next gig, the holiday party at Hardcore Choppers custom motorcycle and hot rod shop. Neil had said the band would be sound checking at 9, but not to worry if we were late - they'd have everything set up for me to plug right into when I got there. I didn't even need an amp, since there'd be a monitor for me.

One thing you have to account for when you get gig instructions from Neil is that generally nothing is accurate. Vicky and I arrived around 9:30. As expected, an Elvis impersonator was performing to fill the band changeover time, but there had been no sound check - in fact, the previous band was still clearing the stage and Magnolia Blue was just getting started setting up. There was no monitor for me. There was nothing set up for me to plug into. The sound man grumbled at having to provide me with a direct  box (a gadget that allows me to connect my keyboard into the PA system), Personally, I consider providing the direct box to be the sound man's responsibility, but every once in a while you run into a sound man who thinks it should be my responsibility. One thing turned out to be accurate - Neil had made good on his promise to bring a keyboard stand (I had one in the car, just in case), but I had to dig it out of a jumble of gear. Oh, and Neil was WASTED. I mean, intoxicated to the point where he'd just stand there and clearly not have the conscious thought power to know what he was doing - or that he should be doing anything at all.

Elvis, wearing an exact replica of the 1974 Dragon jumpsuit

Fortunately, this wasn't anyone's first rodeo and we all know how to pull ourselves together in a chaos situation. I grabbed the amp I had in the car (I always bring one, even when they say I don't need one), got my keyboard set up and successfully negotiated the PA connection with the sound guy. Likewise, everyone else got set up and ready to go. We hit the stage sounding great despite having a semi-comatose Neil at the helm. As soon as we started playing, the go go dancers got up to dance along. A couple of years ago when did this party, the shop was in a different location and the stage setup was a little different, with the dancers on platforms out in the middle of the floor. This time the platforms were right in front of the stage and so I had various women in tight dresses shaking their thang right in my face all night. The girl in the tight black dress and heels would play strictly to the crowd, but her alternate, the petite girl in the black dress and boots, would smile sweetly at the band from time to time - like she was enjoying the experience and was happy to be sharing this good time with us. Awww. Such a wholesome go go dancer.

Monster chopper

My view

Onstage

I should point out that this party was in a motor vehicle shop. So, after ogling the cars outside (a late 60's Buick Riviera, a 1980's slant nose Porsche 911, a Datson 280z, etc.)  you walk in past a jumble of partially disassembled motorcycles into a big, open shop space. The stage was a real stage, but the horns were playing on a platform that was actually some sort of vehicle lift, behind which was a pile of car parts. Most of the main bay had been cleared out for the party (probably the reason so many cars were outside), but a second bay off to the side held an array of works in progress - both choppers and cars, and had a big screen showing UFC Fight Night, for those not into live music and Elvis.

Cars undergoing restoration

Choppers

This was the last gig (at least for now) for Magnolia Blue and we did it with a lot a subs, since a number of the band members had already quit. On drums we had Neil's housemate John (who's not a stranger to our material - he had often played with us at rehearsals once our drummer started getting unreliable). On guitar we had my friend and former (for a little while) Mag Blue guitarist Shawn. Ralph, who played with us for a little while last year, was back on trumpet. And of course as a front man we had zombie Neil.

The amazing thing is that it went really well. Sure, there were times when Neil was supposed to sing but didn't, leaving us to wonder whether to vamp or continue the song. There were times when Neil sang the wrong things, leaving us to wonder whether to follow the song structure or follow what he was singing. Our excellent singer friend Sunny showed up. She came up to sing with us and actually took over for Neil a few times when his processor went into sleep mode. And yet it all held together! Amazing. The crowd, fired up on jello shots, Fireball, cheap beer and trays of Italian food, was up and dancing. A good time was had by all!

At about 1:30AM things wound down. The bathroom had been trashed, and spilled beer was everywhere. I had had a cup of regular coffee before leaving the first party, but the combination of the hours and a couple of beers (one at each party) was starting to take its toll. I loaded my gear out and Vicky and I drove back to Arlington where I dropped her at the Metro stop, despite it being way beyond Metro hours (I simply wasn't a nice enough guy to drive the extra 15 minutes each way to take here all the way home - she caught an Uber the rest of the way). I got home and too wired to sleep, but eventually exhaustion and a little rye whiskey did the trick and I slept like the dead.

Road Noise

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 older you get, both the miles and the number of potty breaks increase). I checked my phone to make sure nothing dire was happening at work and noticed an email from a colleague forwarding the documents I needed for our 11 AM call with a potential teaming partner. Uh oh. I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to participate in this call. Hmmm, what to do? I wasn't going to get to the turnaround in 30 minutes (I'm not a 16 MPH rider). Turn around? No, that wouldn't really get me anywhere. Email that I couldn't make the call after all? Nahh, I didn't want to leave my colleague in the lurch. So, I decided to ride on.

At 11 AM I was just a mile and change short of my destination. I pulled off to the side of the trail and dialed in - but I really didn't want to stand there in the cold for the whole call, so I told them that I was "in the car" on my way back from another appointment and was going to stay on mute because of road noise. I put the phone on speaker and muted it and held it in one hand while I continued to ride - slowly - along the trail. I didn't have the deterity to work the phone with one gloved hand while riding, so any time I needed to participate I'd stop, unmute the phone, say my piece, remute the phone, then keep riding. Fortunately, this didn't go on for too long, as it took me only five minutes or so to get to the doughnut shop. Also fortunate is that my colleague really likes to talk and it was his call, so I was mostly able to just listen and ride.

Once I got to the doughnut shop things got easier. While my colleague blathered on I ordered a doughnut as a birthday treat (I don't usually eat doughuts) and a regular coffee as a ride enhancer. Caffeine is a staple of my longer rides. It's something that I also usually avoid, which makes it super effective as an athletic performance enhancer. A cup of coffee and I'm recharged for a lot of miles.

Thanks to my colleague's loquaciousness what should have been a thirty minute call lasted almost an hour. Once we finally finished I packed up my puffy jacket in my seat bag (it was warming up nicely), put the rest of my gear on, and headed home. The ride home was uneventful, but between riding more slowly than I anticipate and the call, what I expected to be a five hour outing took seven - essentially an all day affair. total mileage was 60.9 - that's 57 for my age and 3.9 for good luck (and doughnuts).

Chincoteague

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 and decided it would be a return to Chincoteague, this time all squeezing into Jim G's house there. Which brings us to the present trip.

Jim had long talked about his house in Chincoteague, but in his self-deprecating way had described it as being quite modest. Valerie and I rolled up on Friday to discover that it was, in fact, a spacious and lovely farmhouse, tastefully decorated in a style that combined farmhouse and seashore styles (you can see it here). Valerie and I were the first after Jim to arrive - which gave us first crack at choice of bedrooms, something of value since the group was pushing the capacity of the house. Jim headed off to paddle while Valerie and I settled in after our long drive, venturing only as far as downtown Chincoteague a few blocks away where we got lunch and shopped at a gourmet sandwich shop.

Others soon began arriving. Rob and Barb arrived all excited about the pony penning that was apparently going on that weekend. This is not the big pony swim and auction - that's in July. Rather, in the spring and fall the "saltwater cowboys" of Assateague round up ponies to do a health check and identify any new foals.

Here come some ponies

Valerie chose to hang back at the house while Rob, Barb and I headed over to check out the pony event. Thanks to Misty of Chincoteague, the wild ponies of Assateague/Chincoteague are nationally famous and the event drew spectators from all over. Some people next to us had driven in from the mid-west (I forget where - all those mid-west states are kinda the same). There were pony junkies who could identify individual horses in the herd, maybe from studying web sites such as this one, which has individual pictures of ponies along with their names.

Ponies in the pen

It was one of those events that was fun because it was an event. I'm not a pony junkie, and standing around waiting for the cowboys to occasionally drive some horses into the pen wasn't all that interesting, but the air of excitement and the energy of the spectator group made it a fun, celebratory event. Eventually the event wound down and we headed back to the house, stopping along the way at the well-regarded Island Creamery for some awesome ice cream (so awesome that I had seconds - which is two more servings of ice cream than I usually allow myself).

Back at the house we settled into our typical mode of enjoying some drinks, over-eating, and socializing.

Dinner

Chilling out

Saturday, Kathy arrived, having set out super-early from DC. When it came time to head out for the day's activities we split into kayaking and non-kayaking groups. The non-paddling group strolled downtown, fetishized yarn, visited the beach, napped, and such. The kayakers headed to the launch at the southern end of the island at the end of Main Street. In previous years we had first dutifully stopped downtown to buy launch permits, but this time our Jim told us we didn't need them (signs to the contrary) and so we skipped this step. The wind had settled a little from Friday's gusty weather, but the residual wind combined with the tides made for somewhat slow going as we paddled across towards Assateague Island. We stopped several times to make sure everyone was OK, each time losing considerable ground as the wind and current pushed us back in the direction we had come. Finally, we all agreed that we were going to go looking for ponies and then dip into Tom's Cove. Alas, there were no ponies to be found - I suspect that they were all either penned up or too spooked by the previous day's round-up to show themselves. We made it fairly far down into Tom's Cover and even explored a little side channel which took us all the way to the road we had driven on the day before to see the ponies - but still saw no horses. I'm not sure if it was conditions, increasing age, illness (Suzanne had a bad cold) or confused decision-making, but while we muddled around on the water for quite a while we covered only about 8 1/2 miles. On our previous trip we had made it out to the sea buoy and over to the lighthouse for a paddle of 11+ miles. Maybe we're getting lazier, but when we finished up we still felt we had had a nice paddle.

Back at the house we settled into our typical mode of enjoying some drinks, over-eating, and socializing.

Glassy despite the currents

Where the water meets the sky

Lunch break

Stretching/relaxing during lunch

Tom's Cove channel

Sunday brought buckets of rain. Paddling in cold, drenching rain is no fun so instead we hung out, took our time packing up and clearing out the house, and then all went out for breakfast, where we over-ate and socialized. After that some of the group headed to the new Harriett Tubman Underground Railroad Museum. Valerie and I gritted our teeth and dove right into the drive home, which included awful bridge traffic. They've got one lane closed on the bridge which, combined with the fact that everyone on the eastern shore did what we did - packed up and headed home early - made for hours of delay. Yuck. Way to undo the mellowness of the weekend.

But still, well worth it. It did seem that the weekend was over almost as soon as it began - next time, three nights!

A Boring Bike Ride in Williamsburg

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 three people - apparently two sisters of my generation and their elderly mother. I Facebook stalked the sisters a little. One of them seemed to be my kind of person - lots of pictures in tie-dye at jam band music festivals. But for whatever reason, I never got around to reaching out to them.

Fast forward a year or two to 2017. It's my birthday and I have tickets to see Dead & Company (the living remnants of the Grateful Dead) at the Capital One arena (nee MCI Center) in DC. Valerie and I are walking down 7th Street and I spot a familiar-looking couple. Suddenly it clicks - it's one of the sisters! Usually I'm pretty shy about this kind of stuff, but in this case I walked up to her and said, "You might think this is crazy, but is your last name 'Mistrough'?" (pronounced to rhyme with "pissed-off"). She said, "Actually, it's 'Mistrough'," (pronounced to rhyme with "bistro"). Apparently they changed the pronunciation as well as the spelling - but she knew the history of the family name enough to be intrigued. Fortunately, they're the kind of people who treat it as a really cool, mystical experience when approached by a stranger claiming to be a distant cousin who recognized them from Facebook. In contrast, faced with such a scenario I would be reflexively suspicious and wonder what kind of scam this weirdo stranger was trying to pull on me. That kind of thinking is probably why I have no friends. Anyway, we FB friended each other on the spot and promised to be in touch.

We did subsequently verify that we are in fact cousins. Her mom remembers my grandfather. They live in North Carolina, so it's pretty amazing to have run into them on a street corner in DC on the way to see a Dead show. Like, unbelievable plot twist unlikely. We stayed in touch online and even met up for a while at the LOCKN Festival in 2018. It was a little hard to chat there, what with the incredibly loud concert music, but at least we got to connect a little.

Which brings me to Hampton. When I got a pre-sale notification for tickets to Dead & Company in Hampton I sanpped up four tickets. Usually, there's plenty of demand among my local Deadhead friends - but this time, for a variety of reasons people weren't going to Hampton for the shows. So, I reached out to my cousins, who it turns out were planning on going but hadn't yet gotten tickets. So I offered them my extras. As seems to be our custom, we arrived separately at the arena, but somehow without knowing where they were amid 10,000 Deadheads outside in the dark I managed to walk right up to them in the parking lot. They're really nice people - we had a great time at the show together and finally got a chance to talk a little and get to know each other better.

Dead & company

Which brings me to the beginning of my story. I have a rule that the time doing an activity has to exceed the time spent traveling to get there. Seven hours in the car for a three hour concert wasn't going to cut it, unless I added some other activity while I was down there. I had thought about trying to meet up with the Chesapeake Paddlers group roving in the area that weekend, but I know from past experience that this trip leader's trips are hard to pin down - they never leave at the time they're supposed to (usually earlier), and the plan is decided somewhat last minute - so, to keep things simple I decided to go bike rather than boat. After a nice breakfast (the Hampton Inn in Williamsburg has cheese grits!) I headed over to Jamestown, the trail head of the Williamsburg to Richmond Capital Trail. I was aiming to ride about 50 miles but I had guessed wrong about the weather was a little underdressed for the temperature. Regular readers know how much I had being cold, so I settled for a slightly less than 30 mile ride - including stops in both directions to warm up in the bathroom at Chickahominy Regional Park. Ironically, Chickahominy is normally the base camp of the CPA trip, but this year they moved across the James River to Chippokes Plantation park.

Bundled up - but not enough

So, the Capital Trail has attractions at its eastern end (all the Williamsburg/Jamestown stuff) and then starting about 15 miles in you start to run across lots of historic plantations. If you look at a map of attractions along the trail, there's only one really boring, featureless section - which is exactly the section I rode. Oh, well.

Anyway, back at Jamestown I went inside the visitor center to change out of my goofy cycling clothes for the drive home. It was lunchtime and so I wandered into the cafeteria, where I wound up getting peanut soup, a buttermilk biscuit, and a salad. Not exactly health food, but how could I say no to good traditional Virginia food :)

Anyway, as promised at the start, a pretty featureless bike ride but with a great backstory the night before.

Georgian Bay, Part 5: Back Home

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 file

We packed and loaded our boats for the last time (easier now, with little food left to pack) and headed first north up Mill Lake then turned west into the wind. Oh, yes - this was the weather I had wanted to avoid by heading home early. And what was demoralizing was that we knew the worst would come at the end. When we did the windy transit from campsite #2 to #3 we hit the worst of it going up Beaverstone Bay and knew that calmer waters awaited us once we rounded the bend into Collins Inlet. Here it was the opposite. We struggled against the wind all day in the relatively protected waters of Collins Inlet (lots of wind, but little wave action) but knew that we had some open water to cross at the very end to get back to Chikanishing. Also, my GPS crapped out again and so did Tom's so we had only Béla's older model to guide us. I was doing my best to identify where we were by looking for the geographic features we were seeing on the map, but in a straight narrow channel there aren't that many distinguishing features.

Heading back

Lunch break

The odyssey comes to an end

The struggle against the wind put us in moods ranging from determination to resignation to just plain foulness. I think Tom was eager to get back at this point and was urging us on, but I insisted on a lunch and rest break before we hit the open water. We found a barely landable area where we scrambled ashore to eat something, stretch out and resting a little. After that, we got a little break as the wind died down for a bit, and so we made better time. Then it was the home stretch, where we emerged from behind the protection of Phillip Edward Island and were open to the immensity of Georgian Bay. The waves were big. Three footers at least, maybe approaching four. Coming at us from our left side (from the open bay) so harder to deal with than head-on. It was a wild ride. Fortunately, we only had to deal with it for about a mile. I was still trying to navigate by map and was off in terms of where I thought the opening to Chikanishing Creek was, but fortunately Béla called it right. We made the turn into the creek at just the right spot and breathed a sigh of relief. Just a few hundred yards of smooth water and we were back at the launch. As we were coming in we passed several groups heading out including two people in a canoe (they came back quickly) and a family in kayaks, including young kids in their own boats. We didn't see the family come back - I hope they didn't run into trouble in the rough water.

Kayakers happy to be back

We packed the cars and drove over to the campground where we stole showers (I think the showers were intended only for campground users, but we didn't care). Oh, it felt good to have a real shower - and they were nice, hot ones - even when I realized that I had forgotten to bring in a towel and had to dry myself with my dirty paddling clothes. Then, it was off to the long trek home. Tom and I stopped back in Parry Sound for dinner (vegan pork BBQ made with jackfruit!) then achieved our goal of making across the border into the U.S. before stopping for the night. Then the next day, we were homeward bound.

Interesting car in the Chikanishing parking lot (Vermont licence plates!)

View at dinner in Parry Sound

Lessons learned:

1. I really like Jen's approach of mixing up soup in a Thermos at breakfast time and having a hot lunch.

2. You can never have too much redundancy. Who would have thought that two of our GPS receivers (the only two with detailed maps of the area!) would crap out at the same time? My chance decision to leave a serving spoon in my food kit really helped when the majority of our cooking tools got accidentally left in the car (though we crafted a nice stirring stick that we carried with us from camp to camp). And it's a good thing we had two water filtration systems with us, as one failed mid-trip.

3. You have to find ways to accommodate the range of the group's paddling endurance, comfort level and speed limits.

4. Figure out the minimum amount of clothing you need, then reduce it by a third.

5. Label everything. Weeks after the trip we're still exchanging emails saying, "Hey, I have an extra X. Whose is it?"

6. Leave No Trace is not as bad as you'd think, and it really impresses your friends back home in terms of what a camping badass you are.

7. Don't worry!

This entry covers campsite #3 back to Chikanishing

Georgian Bay, Part 4: Up Into Collins Inlet

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" campsite on Crume Island and headed out. We initially found ourselves paddling calm water, shielded as we were from the wind, which was blowing from the northeast (we had the landmass of the island protecting us from the wind). The first miles were familiar territory, as we had paddled them the day before. Once we turned the corner into Beaverstone Bay, however, it was a different story as we found ourselves kayaking straight into a fairly strong wind. Paddling into the wind is less nerve-wracking than any other direction, as waves coming at you head-on don’t do nasty things like try to knock you over or spin you off course. Rather, paddling into a headwind is just tiring, like paddling though molasses. Everyone handled it well, but we definitely appreciated a snack break we took in a cove of a small private island, which allowed us to stop paddling for a few minutes without losing ground by being pushed backwards. The cove was home to a private home, complete with totem pole (note to self: in next life, arrange to own a private island).

Around the corner into Beaverstone Bay

About two thirds of the way up Beaverstone Bay we started looking for a place for a lunch break. Unfortunately, the islands in the area had pretty steep shorelines making landing impossible and we had to hunt for a while before finding a small hunk of rock on which to perch - just about big enough for five of us to pull our kayaks out of the water and perch for lunch, and on the other side of a boulder there was privacy for bathroom needs. Eating lunch on a rock, as we did several times on this trip, is something I enjoy, though I understand that it's not everyone's idea of a dream vacation. I think I've passed this kind of sense of adventure on to Ted, as he recently wrote in his own travel blog about having happily eaten tortellini from a Ziploc bag while crouched in a Porta-potty (freshly cleaned, fortunately) taking shelter from a rainstorm during his hike on the C&O and GAP trails. Both tuna on a rock and tortellini in a toilet are the kind of crazy stuff that make you smile but which bring looks of horror to your friends' faces when you tell them about it.

Into Collins Inlet

Paddling in the confines of Collins Inlet

Me

After lunch the going got a little easier, as the wind seemed to let up a little bit. Or maybe it was just my drug-fueled perception of it, as at lunch break I had ingested a miraculous performance enhancer known as caffeine. Since my surgery I've kicked the daily maintenance caffeine habit and instead use it only as needed as a performance-boosting stimulant. About 70 miles into the 100 mile bike ride I did last year a café latte gave me a boost which took me through the rest of the miles, and during lunch on the rock I popped a caffeinated GU gel packet which I had stashed in my PFD for just such purposes. Man, a good shot of caffeine has a Popeye eats-spinach kind of effect on me. Woo Hoo! Bring on the miles!

Energy gel packets such as the one I had stashed in my PFD are popular in the cycling world. In preparation for this trip I bought a few at the Laughing Lizard bike shop and cafe in Herndon (incidentally, the same place I got my latte on my century bike ride). I went in, ordered a decaf latte, making my usual fuss to ensure they make it decaf: “Make sure it’s decaf.” “This is decaf, right?” You should have seen the puzzled look on the guy’s face when I asked him to ring up my decaf “this coffee is decaf, right?” decaf latte and then threw a couple of high caffeine energy packs on the counter as part of the purchase.

Beaverstone Bay offered some lovely scenery in the form of typical Georgian Bay pink glacial pink granite islands and northern woods. Three quarters of the way up the bay we were all pretty tired but our spirits were buoyed when we started to hit channel markers, which confirmed that we were approaching Collins Inlet. We were happy to be getting near the end of our slog into the wind, and indeed when we rounded the corner into the inlet conditions calmed down quite a bit and the scene changed from open water to a narrow body of water lined by high rock cliffs.

Our next challenge was finding a campsite. The paddler’s map has campsites marked, but there’s no indication of which are big enough for a group of five kayakers. We rejected the first one outright as being to small, vertical and exposed, which meant paddling another mile or two to the next one in Mill Lake. We rejected that one for the same reasons. The third campsite showed some promise, but from the water seemed small as well, though the following day we stopped to talk to a group that had come in behind us and camped there. They fit eight people on the site, and while they said it was a tight fit I guess the campsite was bigger than it looked from the water. By this point the water bladder on the back of my PFD was empty and my other bladder was achingly full. We were also running out of sites so even though I'm not generally one to worry, I was starting to get a little anxious to about finding a campsite. Fortunately, Suzanne “had a good feeling” about the site on Archers Island. The site had a tight landing spot, but we got out and found it to be a lovely campsite. We subsequently realized that, as with our previous site, this was one of the sites marked in the Hodnett Canoe Guide. Clearly the Hodnett people had selected the best sites in the area.

Third campsite

We made camp, taking care to set things up carefully. Rain and wind were once again in the forecast for Friday and we wanted to be well battened down in advance of the storm.

I don't remember, but I think it might have been Thursday that I finally took a shower. Tom loves a shower while camping and he loves the "camp craft" of rigging up camping devices. Over the years he's progressed from a solar sun shower to a handheld electric shower (not exactly this one but similar). We set up a collapsible bucket, which gets filled with a combination of lake water and heated water. You dip the hose into the shower bucket and click a button on the nozzle and presto, ... a somewhat warm shower! I had demurred on using the shower when he set it up at the previous campsite because I hate being cold and would rather be stinky than stand naked in a cold breeze, my shivering relieved only by an occasional blast of lukewarm water. However, by Thursday I had gotten to the point where I could no longer control my stench with wipes and so finally broke down and used the shower. Despite the chilliness of the experience it felt really good to get clean. I will say that some group members are happy to bathe themselves in the cold water of the lakes when we travel. The amount of screaming that goes on when they do this usually reconfirms my choice to remain stinky rather than cold. The only time I'll dip myself into a cold lake is if we get a really nice warm, sunny day - of which we had none on this trip.

Can you spot Béla in the water? He's doing something I'll never do - immersing himself in the cold water of Georgian Bay (this is back at campsite #2)

We had Jen’s Gado Gado for dinner while we sat on the point of the island, the sunset to our left and the nearly full moonrise to our right. I drank the last of my bourbon. My food bags were getting pretty light. Must be nearing the end.

Sunset to our left ...

... moonrise to our right

Day 9 (Fri): Our last full day! Well, full day in terms of hours, in that there are still 24 of them, but half day in terms of activities. We knew that bad weather was going to roll in once again and that we would be forced to spend the afternoon tent-bound. We got on the water early to give us time to have a decent outing before the weather rolled in around noon. On our way through Collins Inlet we had passed the abandoned logging town (also known as Collins Inlet) but we were on a hunt for a campsite and didn't stop. We paddled back over to that area where we saw the remnants of the old logging town, which was abandoned in the early 20th century once the area was logged out, and the more recently closed Mahzenazing River Lodge, which appears to only recently have been abandoned - as of 2017, when my paddling of the area map was printed, it was apparently still a going concern (Mill Lake Lodge on the south side of Collins Inlet is still an active business - the only commercial business we saw the whole trip). Along the north side of the inlet you can spot various remnants of the logging days: iron rings anchored in rocks which once were used to hold logging booms in place (Jen guessed the purpose of the rings - later confirmed from the paddling map), remains of pilings from the logging camp’s loading docks, etc. We toured Sawdust Bay, once no doubt aptly named but now returned to a seemingly untouched natural state.

On the way back the wind picked up pretty fiercely, occasionally attempting to spin our boats around. Bela, who in general is the best navigator of the bunch of us, somehow managed to almost get us lost on the way back - not easy to do when you’re paddling a 1/4 mile wide channel. But cooler heads and GPS prevailed and we found our way back with no issues. We timed our trip about right: it was starting to rain as we returned to camp 11ish. All of us except Tom ultimately hunkered down under the tarp for a while and had lunch together. For me it was the rare treat of turkey jerky (not a lot of fat, but I still avoid it because it's loaded with sodium - it was a nice change from my usual choices of tuna and peanut butter), along with a squeeze pouch of fruit mush, week-old tortillas, and a fruit bar. Plus some chickpeas and dried “imperfect” mangoes provided by Suzanne and Béla respectively. Fine dining!

Remnants of logging days

Abandoned logging camp building

Beaver lodge 

Suzanne paddles past abandoned buildings

This tractor isn't going anywhere

After lunch it was another afternoon stuck in the tent in the rain. Here’s a little snippet of the fun things I did while stuck in a roughly 3 x 6 ft. space all afternoon: took my phone off airplane mode to see if it would connect. Spent a few minutes in that frustrating state where the phone says “3G” but really isn’t connecting at all (there was only one specific spot on the island where you could stand and really get connectivity). Put the phone back into airplane mode. Took my headphones out so I could watch some downloaded Netflix. Noticed that the ear buds were kind of gross. Figured out how to gently remove the squishy ear bud tips. Blew the crud out of them by blowing on them, transferring the ear crud first to the screen of my phone, then ultimately to the tent floor. Wondered if I had accomplished anything in terms of increased cleanliness by transferring my earwax from earbuds to tent floor. Switched out of airplane mode to see if connectivity had miraculously improved while I was cleaning my headphones. Spent more time in zombie 3G mode. Put the phone back into airplane mode. Watched Netflix. Read a book. Peed into a bottle to avoid going out into the rain. Noticed that the tent had begun to take on a little bit of that public restroom smell. Vowed to go outside the next time I had to pee. Took pictures of myself making faces. Watched a caterpillar crawl up the outside of my tent. Thought about how I could be showered and halfway home by now. [Note: this paragraph was written in my tent on Friday. As it reflects my frustration with being stuck in the tent in the rain, I have left it pretty much as initially drafted].

After a few hours of rainy solitary confinement in a tent, caterpillars become pretty interesting entertainment

If you are bored enough, making faces into the phone is almost as entertaining as watching caterpillars

I did have the thought that the rainy days gave me a chance to experience how normal people spend their vacations. I mean, if I told people I had spent my vacation reading, catching up on Netflix and napping by a beautiful lake they would have thought it sounded like perfectly normal, relaxing downtime. As long as I left out the peeing into a bottle part. And the pooping into a bag part. And the sleeping and eating on a rock part ...

This entry covers 2nd campsite to 3rd campsite and other explorations in Collins Inlet (the channel across the top of the island).