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.