An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

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...