An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Regular readers know that, while I ride a bicycle, I generally disdain cyclists - by whom I mean the matchy-matchy Spandex(TM)-clad riders who behave like they own every inch of the rideable world. The crappy behavior of cyclists and the general population's hatred of them has been written about over and over  and over again, so there's no point in my beating that dead horse. Instead, here's a little light commentary on a few of the quirky cycling characters I know. First, let me talk about Dan (not his real name). When I first started hanging around with the local cycling crowd Dan was really friendly and welcoming. He's a great guy and super friendly, so it pains me to say anything less than positive about him. But he's a little weird. For one thing, his friendliness extends a little bit too much to total strangers. As he rides down the trail he'll shout out compliments to people he passes, "Oh! I love the way your jersey matches your bike!" or just...

 On October 19th, hoping to catch something near peak foliage, I drove out to Shenandoah National Park to do some hiking. Looking at places to hike, I saw Robertson Mountain mentioned as a neglected gem - overshadowed by nearby popular hikes like Old Rag. You can approach Robertson from the valley ( here and  here are listings for that hike ) but I chose the somewhat easier (though about the same length) hike from Skyline Drive . I parked at the Limberlost parking area (about mile 43 on Skyline Drive) and started out on the Limberlost Trail, which it turns out is one of the accessible trails in the park - it's flat, smooth gravel. It was chilly when I headed out and I started out bundled up in my puffy jacket, wool hat and light gloves. After a little bit, Limberlost intersects with the Old Rag Fire Road, which, being a road, was pretty easy hiking by the standards of Shenandoah. I mean, the trail is wide and flat enough to drive a truck down - something I saw proof of when a...

This was the incredible shrinking trip. I had originally hoped to pull off an overnight bike camping trip. Unfortunately, as the date approached I just couldn't motivate myself to prepare for a camping trip, which is a lot of work no matter how many times you've done it before. So I changed to the idea of doing a day of biking, staying over in a hotel, then a day of hiking. But really, who wants to stay in a hotel in these COVID times, particularly in areas which may not take it seriously? And let's face it, given the political signs around town I'm not at all certain this is an area that gives much weight to pandemic precautions. Also, as the date approached, the weather, while great for biking (cloudy, though warm), wasn't great for leaf peeping - so I decided to put off the hiking portion and just do a cycling day trip. Yeah, maybe I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel in this town So here's what it came down to: a roughly 50 mile one day bike ride. I would ...

Belmont Bay has been one of my favorite places to paddle since way back at the beginning of my kayaking explorations. The setting is beautiful, the bird life is outstanding, and it's a no muss, no fuss launch - you can pull right up to the launch beach to unload. The launch is car-top only, so you're not dodging power boats Frogger style.  The launch at Mason Neck State Park In the days before blogs I kept notes on my paddling in a written journal and my first entry for paddling at Mason Neck was from my second visit there, on 7/25/1999. The entry mentioned, which I had forgotten, that Mason Neck was the first place I launched my very first kayak. It's a special place for me. I think it's a special place for a lot of people. My choice of Mason Neck for this particular outing was to do maintenance on a geocache I had placed on little Conrad Island, across the bay near the powerboat channel. I'm not really doing much with geocaching anymore, and this is the last activ...

7/12/21 Our last full day on the west coast! I guess we were running out of things to do, a little bit. In the morning, Valerie stayed back at Ted's apartment while he and I walked the nature trail around the outside of the Facebook campus, which is very close to Ted's place. Facebook occupies what used to be Sun Microsystems' headquarters, and we discovered (while searching for a geocache, of course) that the back side of the Facebook sign at the entrance to the complex still says Sun Microsystems. That's no accident. Sun was at one time a premiere computer brand, but they tanked in the dot-com crash of the early 2000's as dot-com companies went bankrupt and dumped their used Sun computers on the market at low prices. The company never recovered and in 2009 was swallowed up by Oracle. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg intentionally left the Sun sign there as a reminder to his employees never to be complacent, even when it seems you're on top. On our walk we also no...

  7/9/21 Friday was another outdoor adventure day and followed pretty much the same contours as the previous day, except that Valerie opted out of the physical exertion. Prior to the trip I had planned on hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore (which Ted had previously visited and found quite beautiful), but as with Monterey, once we got to California I decided to cut down on the driving time and opt for something closer to "home". I think I might have felt differently if we had rented a car and were doing some of the driving, but we were relying on Ted and his aging two door Honda Civic for all our transportation, and I really didn't want to make too many demands on him as our chauffer. So Ted and I decided instead to hike at Ed Levin Park in Milpitas, not far, as it happens, from where we had rented kayaks the day before. On our way out we dropped Valerie at the Stanford Shopping Center - she was happy to spend the day hiking the mall while we hiked the mountains. Afte...