Lake Champlain Part 2: Plattsburgh to Valcour Island

Tuesday

Suzanne and I are early risers in the group so it was no surprise when I bumped into her at the stroke of 6 AM at the coffee pot in the hotel breakfast room (my kind of camping breakfast!). Jen followed close behind and I soon found myself engaged in a scintillating conversation about their cats – and how to steal the bananas back from the table of Germans who were monopolizing them. Eventually Tom and Rob joined us and the Germans left, solving both our conversational and fruit challenges. We made plans to head to Peru Dock, from whence we would launch to Valcour Island.

“Ahh, Valcour Island,” you say. “Isn’t that the site of a Revolutionary War naval battle?” Why, yes, it is. American forces under the command of Benedict Arnold (still a good guy at this point in the war!) managed to get shot to pieces by a superior British fleet before limping away. Like many Revolutionary War battles, the Americans didn’t exactly win but managed to do damage to the British by slowing and wearing them down and making the Brits chase them around endlessly. My favorite Revolutionary War general, Nathaniel Greene, is most famous not for a great military victory but for a masterful strategic retreat across the breadth of North Carolina. The way a rebel insurgency beats a superpower’s military is through this kind of slow attrition rather than decisive victories, unless of course you can figure out a way to blow up their Death Star. But I digress.

Valcour Island has some gorgeous rock formations

The crossing to Valcour was short but had the roughest water of the trip to that point. We made the roughly one mile crossing and proceeded clockwise around the island to survey the available campsites. By the time we made it from where we started  around the top of the island, past Spoon Bay and Sloop Bay, through a narrow, surf-pounded passage between two islands, and into Smuggler’s Harbor we had travelled around most of the island and were ready to be done with the waves even though we had paddled only five miles. We declared that we had found the best possible campsite – which indeed, we had! Smuggler’s Harbor, which we alternately referred to as Snogger’s Harbor (though no snogging took place) and Schmuckler’s Harbor, was such a desirable site that even though it was during the work week in the off-season we found it to be frequently visited by other boaters looking for a place to hang out, party or camp. One day we returned from kayaking to find a power boat in “our” harbor, with the owner stark naked on the nearby shore. He quickly pulled on clothes (shirt before pants, I am told – I stopped looking his way after a first glance) and took off.

Smuggler's Cove

Now, here’s where we were bad campers. Schmuckler’s Harbor contained three campsites – well, two and a half: our campsite, another picnic table and fire ring up on an adjacent bluff (this site had no outhouse, no access except through our campsite and almost no place to set up a tent, which is why I label it a half campsite), and a completely separate campsite at the other end of the cove. In all fairness, we could have shared the cove another group but were worried that power boaters would disturb our peace with their seemingly inevitable partying and loud music, so we scattered our gear around enough to make it look like all the sites were occupied. I mean, we were five people with five tents, so we could lay legitimate claim to multiple sites. We wouldn’t have been so territorially greedy in peak season, but the island has twenty-five campsites and in our paddle around we had seen only one other tent and so we felt that even in monopolizing the cove we were leaving plenty of campsites for everyone else. When we were in camp we always left one kayak over at the other site. One time when some power boats came into the Tall Tom went over to the far campsite and plopped down in his chair and glared at the boaters. This wasn’t partial exposure to Tom’s glare – rather, it was full exposure. The boaters left.

Camp craft

The rest of the day Tuesday was consumed with setting up camp and general camp craft. One of the enjoyable things about these trips is tweaking gear and procedures each time. For example, before the trip I sewed a loop of elastic onto the deck of my spray skirt allowing me to keep my GPS right in front of me in my lap rather than having it a foot and a half away on the deck of the kayak. This was a success – it really helped in navigating to be able to continuously consult the GPS. In camp, Tall Tom set up the latest iteration of his camp shower – this time with a battery-powered showerhead! Previous years' iterations were gravity-fed, which meant very little water pressure and the need to hoist heavy bags of water up high. In this version, the bucket of water stayed down low. The handheld shower contained a pump which drew water up a hose from the bucket. I used it only once (I would rather be stinky than cold – my apologies to my fellow campers – and so don’t like getting wet unless it’s pretty warm out), but it was, in fact, very cool. I’m just amazed that Tom had room, even in his big 18 foot boat, for tarps and showers and collapsible buckets. I'm something of a minimalist and still barely fit everything into my kayak. I respect people who hav eth etime and interest to fiddle with stuff like the shower.

Dinner on Weds was Suzanne’s beloved penne with tuna, olives and feta. When the storm passed on Wednesday morning it left behind warmer weather – we all slept comfortably.

Campfire at Smuggler's Cove

The privy at Smuggler's Cove

My tent (center), Rob's and Suzanne's

Wednesday

The weather for the remainder of the week got better by the day. Wednesday was quite a nice day – still breezy, though. We decided to head south to paddle the two mouths of the Ausable River. As the river wends its way towards the lake it splits into two branches and so in essence the river has two mouths. This trip was sort of a two for one: from the island (labelled “almost one rock” in the Revolutionary War map below) to Ausable Point (labelled “Pointe au Sable” on the map) was big water on the open lake. Then, entering the river the feeling totally transformed into the intimacy of small creek paddling – the mouth of the Ausable is small, peaceful, pretty and calm. We paddled up to the junction of the two branches and a bit beyond. As I mentioned earlier, the lake level was low and so we had to get out and walk the boats here and there, and not far beyond the junction the river ceased to be navigable, with some small rapids. At the top of the navigable section we took a snack break and then headed out via the other fork, which required a little fortitude because the transition from the junction to the fork was a small rapid with rapidly moving water and a sharp curve – not ideal for sea kayaks, but not as bad in execution as it looked going into it. We all made it through just fine and had an uneventful trip back to Schmuckler’s Cove. It was my turn to cook dinner, and my two bean and chicken white chili was a success.

The Battle of Valcour Island

Rob stopping to take a photo on the Ausable River

Coming out of the Ausable River back into the main lake

Cooking

You may wonder how we do dishes on these trips. It’s a three step process. First, we dip everything in the lake to scrub off any major residue – leftovers and the like. Yes, the first step in cleaning the dishes is to coat them in giardia, cryptosporidium, motor oil and whatever else might be floating around in the lake. Then we take some hot, soapy filtered (potable) water and use that to really scrub the dishes. We generally use the same water for the whole meal’s dishes so the first dishes get nice and clean while the last dishes not so much. The third step is to sanitize the dishes by dipping them in potable water to which a bit of bleach has been added. Dishes which have been dipped in lake water, washed with dirty wash water and then been given a coating of bleach may not meet everyone’s idea of “clean”, but we’ve generally stayed healthy on our trips, so it must work! In any case, the cook doesn’t clean so I was happy not to have dish duty.

This is what dish duty looks like

I don’t remember whether it was Wednesday or not, but the critters on the island started attacking our stuff big time. One night Suzanne’s dry bag of food was gnawed through while hung from a tree. The next, Rob’s Platypus bottle of Manhattans was gnawed into. Perhaps it was foolish to have left the bottle out on the picnic table overnight, but we got a kick imaging the drunk chipmunks who drank Rob’s Manhattans. The darn critters even chewed through the shower hose, which was totally inexplicable because in no way was that associated with the smell or taste of food. Maybe it was the drunk ones who did it.

Another 12 mile day.

There are too many pretty sunset pictures to post

Thursday

This was a great weather day. We awoke to find the lake like glass, quite the change from the heavy chop of a few days earlier. The smooth conditions made this the perfect day for some more open water, so we decided to head east and do the crossing to North Hero Island. As seemed to be the case every day, conditions kicked up a little bit as we got onto the water and so we had some chop as we covered the three miles across to a protected bay at the southwest corner of South Hero Island Along the way we passed a rock known as Carleton’s Prize. Apparently, in a dense fog during the Revolutionary War battle referenced earlier, British commander saw what he thought was an American ship and had his ships pound it with cannon fire for some time before realizing that it was just a rock protruding from the water. There is some local lore that the Americans had hoisted logs on the island to look like masts in an intentional act of deception, but it may just have been that General Carleton was clueless – certainly it might have occurred to him sooner to question why the ship was neither returning fire nor fleeing.

Playing with trucks at White's Beach

Jen, Tom and Suzanne at White's Beach

We landed at White’s Beach (one of the places pointed out to me in my pre-trip conversation with a local paddler) for a lunch break. We chatted with a local retired couple who were sitting in lawn chairs enjoying the view of the bay on a splendid day. They insisted that we go see the dinosaurs. Despite always keeping an eye out for Champ, the lake’s answer to the Loch Ness monster, we hadn’t seen any dinosaurs on our way in, but we had noticed a large number of brightly colored birdhouses dotting the shoreline. Like a zillion of them. It turns out that a local resident is a prolific birdhouse builder and, according to Atlas Obscura, the birdhouses have a purpose – to attract swallows which in turn gobble up the otherwise troublesome mosquito population. Apparently the birdhouse guy is something of a character, since in addition to creating the birdhouse forest he has dotted it with large scale replicas of dinosaurs. We got a kick out of it.

Part of the birdhouse forest - with dinosaurs

There’s a skinny 3 mile long causeway connecting South Hero to mainland Vermont – almost. The causeway was built as a railway around the turn of the 20^th century, but railway service was discontinued in the 1960’s and the causeway has since been converted to a bike trail. Alas, a chunk of the causeway collapsed at some point in the past and so it no longer completely connects South Hero and the mainland. I understand there’s a tiny ferry that runs people across the 200 ft. gap in the high season – it wasn’t running when we were there. While a dead end for runners and cyclists, the opening in the causeway is a great boon to boaters who would otherwise have to go all the way around South Hero Island (upwards of 25 miles) to get into Mallett’s Bay and its environs. We paddled down the causeway and through the gap, took a peek in the direction of Camp Skyland, a commercial campsite we had considered as a backup location, then turned around and headed back to camp.

Paddling through the causeway gap

On the way back my left trapezius muscle started to painfully spasm and so the haul back to camp seemed longer than it was. I pride myself on not being particularly achy (I have written before about being the sole abstainer in the daily ibuprofen feast that is the norm for these trips) but today was an exception. Upon returning to camp my first act was to was to wash down a couple of Alleve with a shot of bourbon, which helped somewhat.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon and so we all took dips in the lake followed by showers (separately!). I have a rather 19^th century level of modesty (certainly in comparison with my male companions) and so I did what for me was a rarity – took off my shirt and lay down on the warm stone along the shoreline of our cove. The warm rock and the sun further helped my shoulder.

In the later afternoon two kayakers, Shawn and Karen, paddled into the cove to chat. Since they weren’t power boaters and weren’t looking to make camp we didn’t run them off. Rather, we chatted. Strangely, while the Burlington side of the lake has an active kayaking community, they said they were among the few kayakers on the Plattsburgh side of the lake. Jen was quite interested in talking with them – she lives less than two hours away, which counts as close by in these parts, and so was happy to meet some other “nearby” paddlers. They said they would leave their contact info on Jen’s windshield back at Peru Dock. I should mention that in talking about choosing kayaks it came up that Shawn was 6’ 8” tall, and so he and Tom got to commiserate about how hard it is for the big guys to find kayaks that fit them. I should also mention that kayaking is a very small sport – we all knew people in common from the kayaking world, and not just celebrity kayakers like Dubside.

Back in camp it was Tom’s turn for dinner: massuman curry (based on those little cans of curry seasoning from the Asian market), naan, canned hummus (in case you’re keeping score, that makes three types of hummus – Jen’s dehydrated real stuff, my instant hummus kit, and Tom’s canned stuff), and the crème de la crème, Cheese Whiz (no refrigeration necessary!) and crackers. I thought I was going to be the junk food king on the trip for having brought the organic version of Pringles to accompany my dinner, but Tom’s Cheese Whiz and (later) Rob’s Twinkies took the prize.

Another 12 mile day.

Lake Champlain Part 1: Pre-trip to Plattsburgh

Pre-trip

Every trip starts with a trip to get to the trip. Sometimes we travel together, but this time each and every one of us drove separately. I was held up at work and so my journey started a little later than planned which led to me having to slog through afternoon rush hour. I covered only 50 miles in my first two hours of driving – ugh. Eventually the road opened up and I cruised through the forgettable landscape of central Pennsylvania. I had hoped to make it to New Paltz, the site of many fond if fuzzy memories from years ago, but given the traffic delays I made it only as far as Scranton, which left me five hours of driving to do on Friday. I got an early start and had no problem making it to my planned rendezvous with Jen (describing it that way sounds more suspicious than it was) on Friday at Peru Dock on the New York side of the lake. The plan had been that we’d leave my car at Peru Dock and another car at Kamp Kill Kare in Vermont so that in case of bad weather (which we’d heard was a significant possibility on Lake Champlain) we would always be near a car.

Notice that past perfect progressive tense in the last sentence? There’s a famous quote that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.* Well, no kayaking plan survives very long past the beginning of the trip. While Jen and I were dropping a car at Peru Dock Rob and Tom met up to deposit a car at Kill Kare. They called the park office to inform them that they were going to leave a car there for a few days and, despite our having checked it all out in advance, were informed  it wasn’t appropriate for them to leave a car at Kill Kare since the islands on which we planned to camp were closed! Apparently, it had something to do with letting the islands’ ecology have a break after camping season. This was pretty perplexing – the web site for the park didn’t mention this closure and neither had anyone we had spoken with on the phone. We half suspected that the information we were getting was coming from someone at headquarters who wasn’t really in touch with what was going on.

Rob and Tom started investigating alternatives. One option was car camping at Grand Isle State Park. As it happened, Jen and I had to pass by this park on our way to Burlington and so we stopped in to check it out. The employee we chatted with at the park was worn out from the season – cynical, a little punchy, and ready to be done with the season’s tourists, but she did give us a key nugget of information, which was that it was possible to launch at the privately owned Hero’s Welcome store on North Hero Island, from which it was an easy paddle across to Kn1t3 Island (note - Kn1t3 is not the real name of the island - I have obscured the name to protect the guilty).

Out and About in Burlington

All of us met up at our Burlington AirBnB, which had the feel of low budget off campus housing (clean, but low budget). After settling in we headed out to Foam Brewery, recommended by my craft brew obsessed neighbor Steve C. Foam turned out to be an excellent recommendation – interesting brews, an in-house magician who circulated among the tables doing impressive card tricks, a great view of the lake, and friendly customers (we got an overview of the Revolutionary War history of the lake from the history teacher at the next table). Rob had made a dinner reservation for us at Hen of the Wood, an upscale restaurant which was conveniently just a few blocks from Foam. Hen of the Wood is a Burlington kind of restaurant – locavore, sustainable, organic, blah, blah, blah. The web site has an image of a guy hauling a freshly killed deer on the back rack of his mountain bike. I guess the goal is to have fresh local venison while maintaining a low carbon footprint. Anyway, the meal was fabulous. I had halibut. Other entrees included beet pappardelle and rabbit. This was shaping up to be my kind of camping! We skipped the desserts at Hen in favor of walking over to Ben & Jerry’s** for ice cream. Along the way we got distracted by a large outdoor store – we browsed, but our wallets survived largely intact.

The group enjoying a drink at Foam

Foam's staff magician shows his stuff

Not the Ur Ben & Jerry's, but close enough

Over dinner we agreed on a nefarious plan - that we were going to launch at Hero’s Welcome and sneak our way onto Kn1t3 Island. If we got kicked off, we’d deal. If we didn’t we would have the place to ourselves!

*This quote is often misattributed to Nazi Field Marshal Rommel but it was Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder who said it. I don’t sprinkle my writing with Rommel quotes, OK?

**I had thought that this was the first Ben & Jerry’s, but it turns out the original shop was a couple of blocks away in a building which has since been torn down. Close enough.

Part II: Kn1t3Island

Saturday

The day started off in a leisurely fashion. We strolled through the remnants of a street festival down to Handy’s, an old-fashioned (founded 1945) lunch counter sort of place. The crowd at the U-shaped counter was a mix of college students, artsy types, and general locals. From there we went to the supermarket (Jen and I had shopped there the day before but others still needed some things) and made another outdoor store detour – this time to the Sierra Trading Post across from the supermarket. Sierra Trading Post is a well-known online discounter of outdoor gear and we just couldn’t resist peeking inside – particularly one of our group, who we joke has platinum status there.

Lake Champlain has its own Loch Ness monster, named Champ

Alas, all of us including our Sierra Trading Post super shopper were underwhelmed by what was available at the store – STP has gone downhill as a bargain-hunter’s paradise since their acquisition by TJ MAXX. Having fulfilled our shopping needs we continued on to Hero’s Welcome.

Hero’s Welcome is a popular stopping point for both cyclists and boater and so the place was hopping. They were game to let us park there for a few days and made no mention of any restrictions on camping on Kn1t3 Island. As expected, they’re not park rangers and so really didn’t care what we were up to as long as we paid our parking and launch fees. I will mention that we had an interesting role reversal going on within our group dynamics. Usually Tom is the rule-breaker among us, Suzanne and I are the cautious ones, with Rob and Jen wisely staying on the sidelines while Tom, Suzanne and I argue things out. This time, though, for whatever reason it was Tom who was worried while Suzanne and I were the ones wanting to go for it.

Getting ready at Hero's Welcome

Packing the boats for the first time on a trip always takes a long time and it was 2 PM by the time we set out on the short, choppy paddle to Kn1t3Island. It’s always something of a shock to paddle a loaded kayak, as the boats feel really different loaded – hard to get and keep moving, but super stable. We chose a campsite on the east side of the island, as far from civilization and the ranger station (!) as we could get. The rest of the day was spent setting up camp. The Kn1t3 Island campsites were quite nice. Ours had a clean outhouse, and a lean-to shelter with a picnic table in it. The two nights we spent on Kn1t3 Island were chilly (lows in the 40’s) and breezy, so having the shelter was great in that it helped us stay warm while we ate and hung out. Dinner was Jen’s excellent polenta with goat cheese, spinach, almonds and raisins, accompanied by and followed by consumption of wine.

Hanging out in the lean-to on Kn1t3 Island

Kn1t3 Island "Ironwood" campsite

That whole first evening we continued to work ourselves into a lather figuring that a platoon of park rangers was going to swarm our campsite at any second. 

After a long day we retired to our tents. My major gear acquisition for the trip was a down sleeping bag, which was able to be compressed down into a really small size but which kept me nice and warm, even on those coldest nights.

Sunday

Each member of the group contributes some set of special skills, kind of like The A-Team. Rob and Tom are our experts at purifying water – their fancy gravity feed water purification system easily satisfies our water needs. One of my specialties (besides being exceptionally charming) is in route and map planning. While I am not formally trained in map reading, I always scrutinize the charts and Google maps to get a feel for where we’ll be traveling and camping. I also scope out places to explore and send out a set of GPS waypoints for key locations to everyone in advance of the trip. As part of my research prior to this trip I had gotten in touch with a member of the local Lake Champlain Kayak Meetup, who had mentioned several things to me, including that there was a “sometimes navigable” culvert under a road that allowed you to cut across a narrow part of North Hero Island and access protected paddling on Carry Bay on the west side of the island.

We awoke to continued breezy weather and choppy conditions, so we decided to go in search of the Carry Bay cut-through to find some non-choppy water for our day’s outing. Needless to say, I had calculated a waypoint for where I thought the culvert might be based on my examination of the satellite imagery, and it was pretty spot-on. What we found when we got there was a roughly eight-foot diameter by eighty foot long pipe passing under a road. The problem was, we couldn’t exactly paddle through it. What we didn’t know yet was that due to drought conditions the lake was about five feet below its normal level. As a result, the pipe was above the water line. After some consultation we decided to go for it and carried the kayaks up the slope into the pipe. The pipe had a few feet of standing water in it and so we easily floated the boats from one end to the other and then we carried them down a slope into the bay. It was daunting when we first saw it, but pretty easy in execution.

In the culvert

Passing boats into the culvert

And it was worth it. Carry Bay is quite protected from the weather and so once through the culvert we were treated to smooth, nearly windless paddling through the bay and up a channel between North Hero and a peninsula. We had thought we might paddle a loop - go all the way around the top of North Hero, but at our lunch break we decided it was too far (would have been a total of 20ish miles) and so we turned around and did the whole culvert thing again back home. We were relieved upon our return to camp not to find any angry rangers or eviction notices.

Sunset on Kn1t3 Island

The scheduling of this year’s trip presented something of a conundrum to me since the major Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashonah fell during the week of the trip. Only once before have I been away for one of the Jewish high holidays (Yom Kippur in Korea!), but I decided I would go for it. In advance of the trip I downloaded a מחזור (holiday prayer book) onto my phone and I figured I would skip paddling on Monday. Sunday late afternoon I settled into the lean-to to read through the evening service, but I was tired from paddling and started to doze off (which is not atypical for Rosh Hashonah services!) and so went to my tent and took a quick nap. After dinner (packaged Trader Joe’s Indian dal curry over farro) while the rest of the group chatted I sat in the back of the lean-to and read through the rest of the service. 

Monday

Remember that part about my not kayaking on Rosh Hashonah? Well, it didn’t exactly work out that way. Because we were (maybe) breaking the rules by camping on the forbidden island we figured we better not risk more than two nights there. Plus, the forecast called for a cold, rainy period from mid-day Monday to mid-day Tuesday, including really rough water. Camping in the rain stinks. Setting up camp in the rain is worse. Spendign the rest of the week with wet gear would have been really bad. We’re in this for the vacation, not as some sort of Spartan endurance test, so we decided we would skip the 24 hour rainstorm by spending Monday night ashore. Using the miracle known as the Internet Tom booked us a couple of rooms at the Plattsburgh, NY Fairfield Inn. We broke camp (on Rosh Hashonah), kayaked back to Hero’s Welcome (through beaming waves which had already built to 2+ feet, on Rosh Hashonah), and drove to Plattsburgh to the hotel (still Rosh Hashonah). So yeah, I didn’t exactly do that “not kayaking on Rosh Hashonah” thing. I didn’t skip the holiday entirely though – in addition to reading through the service Sunday evening I managed to sneak in performing the Tashlickh ritual while we were unloading at Hero’s Welcome.

I look pretty happy for someone who is going to burn in Hell for kayaking on Rosh Hashonah (wait, we don't exactly believe in Hell ...)

We ate lunch at Anthony’s, an Italian restaurant in Plattsburgh recommended by a woman we spoke with while unloading at Hero’s Welcome. From the name I was expecting a third-rate red sauce Italian place but it turned out to be quite excellent and not strictly southern Italian. Since we had gone straight from Hero’s Welcome to the restaurant we were way too bedraggled lookiong for what turned out to be an upscale kind of place, but we pretended we looked decent. I ordered pastrami-seasoned smoked salmon on a baguette with horseradish aioli, but exercised a little self-control and eschewed the desserts - though everyone else indulged. Bourbon pecan pie. House-made carrot cake ice cream, etc. Yum!

At the hotel we got adjoining rooms and spent the evening sorting and repacking gear (it seems like much of the time on these trips is spent unpacking, packing and schlepping). Rob, Tom and I shared a room. Since I had gotten the best bed at the AirBNB back in Burlington I was consigned to the worst one in Plattsburgh: a wheel-in cot, a throwback to the vacations of my youth where as the youngest I always got the crappiest sleeping arrangements. No matter – after a couple of nights on my camping cot, the hotel cot felt like heaven.

Oh, I forgot to mention – after a perusal of the Yelp! Reviews for Plattsburgh restaurants (during which we somehow decided that Duck Biscuits would be a great band name), we had dinner at a Greek place downtown. Food was OK, but no match for Anthony’s.

Cecilfest

Just a quick and brief write-up of my experiences at Cecilfest. As regular readers know, my friend and band-mate Cecil hosts this large, weekend-long campout party every year. To quote Cecil's explanation on the Cecilfest Web site:

"The question that I get asked the most is, 'Why do you do it?. To make a long story short, a professor of mine in college, Robert W. Smith, created a scenario in class with an ending that scared me. ‘…As we get older our circle of friends gets smaller and smaller.’ Friends are the most important part of my life and I want to make that circle grow as large as possible."

Magnolia Blue was the Saturday night headliner. I also got asked to play on Friday with a pick-up group put together by Rob Hornfeck. So, Cecilfest became a two night camput for me.

The event's previous location west of Dulles has been sold (no doubt to a McMansion developer) and so there was a new location this year - a beautiful piece of land alongside the Shenandoah River just outside of Harper's Ferry. I wanted to get out of DC ahead of the worst of Friday evening traffic, whic got me there mid-afternoon on Friday. This gave me a chance to grab a primo campsite right by the river. On one side of me was a woman with two young kids, and on the other a quiet guy who turned out to be Terry, the brother of Gary, Magnolia Blue's trombonist. Terry knows Cecil from college which is how Gary got introduced to the band. While I was setting up my tent some eccentric character came over and started chatting. Among the things he told me was that he hadn't brought any camping gear and so might just be sleeping on the ground. He stopped by my campsite a number of times Friday, but I didn't see him after that. He did seem to know other people there - hopefully someone took him in. The other Jesse (Magnolia Blue's drummer) was playing Friday with Rob too. He showed up some time in the afternoon with minimal borrowed camping gear (no sleep mat!) and set up his tent near mine.

My campsite

Friday's set went quite well - particularly for a band that met each other for the first time onstage! I love playing with Rob - he's an excellent guitarist and when he gets onstage he sheds his 7th grade math teacher persona and goes full-on guitar god. Check out the windmills!

Cecilfest chalices (and Cecil!)

I didn't hang around and watch the other Friday night bands; not long after our set I went back to my tent for the night. Cecilfest is not a place for easy sleeping, though. The music and partying goes on all night long. Fortunately, my experience growing up adjacent to the New York City subway serves me well to this day and with the aid of bourbon and Benadryl I got to sleep without much problem.

I knew I would be hangin' around all day Saturday and so I brought my bike. After a leisurely breakfast by the river I headed out to do a ride on the C&O canal towpath. I had considered the possibility of road riding right out of the campsite, but twisty West Virginia roads with no shoulders don't make for good riding - I had visions of being squashed by some redneck in a pickup truck. It wasn't a long drive to get to the C&O, which runs right by Harper's Ferry, though I can legitimately say I had to drive through three states to get to my start (Harper's Ferry sits at the intersection of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland and drove through all three).

I parked at Dargan Bend Recreation area, which has a nice, large parking lot and well maintained pit toilets. I headed west on the trail for about nine miles and then rode up into Shepherdstown and explored the town a bit - pretty college town. On the way back, just two miles from Dargan's Bend I got a flat tire, which I had to fix on the fly - otherwise I would have had to have walked the bike two miles back. I filled the tire only partially, not wanting to stress it. This turned out to have been a good decision, since I must have pinched the tube or something doing the trail side repair. Sunday night (I was back home and the bike was back in the basement) the tire blew out with such a bang that Valerie and I, two floors away, jumped!

C&O Canal towpath

At Shepherd College - ram mascot

Riding on dirt is slower than riding on pavement, so my eighteen mile ride, plus the time to drive to and from the trail, wound up taking up the whole morning. I got back to the campsite in time for some lunch, and then the rest of my band mates started arriving. Gary set up a tent in our area. Swish (alto sax player) wasn't staying overnight, but he and his wife pulled up chairs to hang out. Shawn (guitar) pulled up in his big ol' pickup truck (he's in the building trades so has an actual legit reason for owning a big pickup). Wingo (tenor sax player) showed up too. So we had a pretty nice little band encampment! I had somehow neglected to bring dinner so I made do with a combination of snacky items and food scrounged from the Cecilfest mega pot luck.

The Magnolia Blue set went well too. We went on at around 10 and played for about two and a half hours - it went by quickly! As we got off the stage someone started yelling "Fire! Fire!" We looked and there was a tree on fire not far from the stage! I'm not sure anyone is clear on exactly what happened. Cecil brings in a big honkin 40kW generator to power the big stage and someone said an electrical cable overheated, but I don't think the power ran anywhere near the tree. Who knows. In any case, putting my own interests first, I continued packing up my gear and by the time I finished loading the car the fire had been extinguished.

Magnolia Blue

Me

Saturday was another late night. After the main stage shuts down there's late night music from an acoustic (but amplified!) dup known as the Free Floating Musical Experience, which is somehow on a small stage provided by the Alexandria Cryptozoology and Paranormal Society. I don't even pretend to get it. Anyway, when I woke up at 2:30 FFME was still playing, but they were done by the time I woke up Sunday morning, so I can't tell you how long into the night they played - just that it was until some time between 2:30 and 6:30.

Soul patch

One last thing - right before leaving for Cecilfest I shaved off my goatee (techically, since it included a mustache it was a Van Dyke, but everyone refers to such a beard as a goatee), leaving only the little soul patch below the lower lip. Valerie noticed when we Facetimed that evening and demanded that I shave the damn thing off when I returned home. Which I did.

Anyway, Sunday morning I woke up and broke camp, not even taking time for breakfast, and headed home. Perfect weather, fun time.

First Century

From the title of this post, "First Century", the reader may be expecting a missive about the death of Caeser Augustus and the succession of Tiberius, or perhaps something about the Han Dynasty. But no, it's about a bike ride.

The short version: Friday, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little bike ride. So I biked to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd bike to the end of the town. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just bike all the way to Purcellville.

Yes, that's dialog from Forest Gump, edited to change running to biking, but it pretty well fits.

Really, here's how it went: Since last year's catastrophe I've been working to build up my cycling endurance (I would love to build up my speed too, but that seems to be a lost cause). A few weeks ago I hit a major milestone when I rode a metric century: 100 km, or roughly 62 miles. Shortly after that I was talking with a friend about cycling during a shiva (mourning ritual). He's a cyclist and opined that if you can ride sixty miles, you can do a hundred. I'm not sure I buy that argument, but I wasn't going to argue with a guy whose father had just passed away. But I did believe that, having done sixty miles I could do eighty, and that just maybe if I had some gas left in the tank at the end of eighty miles I could push on beyond that. So, I figured I would try an eighty mile ride with the possibility of an extension. As it happens, there's a wonderful almost exactly eighty mile bike ride pretty much right out my front door: the W&OD rail trail out to Purcellville and back.

Here's the thing: if you're going to be on your bike for umpteen hours you want the weather to be as perfect as possible. Not muggy. Not cold. Not windy. Certainly not rainy. So, here comes this forecast for perfect, perfect weather on a Friday, which is a day off for me and, being a weekday, a good day to ride the W&OD (which local cyclists pronounce "wad" rather than "Double You and Oh Dee"). The trail can get pretty busy on weekends. Friday, it was!

I wanted to do the ride solo, since I wanted to be able to choose my pace and my breaks without having to negotiate with anyone else. Plus, if I dissolved into a heap at mile 75, no one would know but me :) Fortunately, in this day and age of cell phones and Uber (plus the fact that a good bit of my ride would be along one Metro route or another), I knew that even with a mechanical or personal breakdown I wasn't going to wind up too stranded. So, Friday, solo it was!

Since the ride was going to be an all day affair and so my plan was to start riding at 6:30 AM. As it happened, Valerie had been having some issues at work - and so I decided to hang around for a bit so I we could chat in the morning. With that and the usual last minute this and that (slathering on sun screen, for example), Friday, solo at 7 AM it was!

A lot of weekend warriors buy into all sorts of "sports nutrition" that's sold by the sports-industrial complex: energy gels, Gatorade, anti-"bonk" bars and the like. I was having none of it. Knowing that there would be plenty of opportunity to buy stuff along my route I left home with a pretty minimal kit: one water bottle (if I ever ride a century again this is something I will change - I will add a second water bottle cage to my bike), a 100 calorie Kind bar as an emergency snack, my phone and external battery, headphones in case I got bored, arm sleeve thingees to keep the sun off, and basic tools to fix a flat tire and other minor issues. A lot of people wouldn't do such a ride without chamois creams, body glide, or whatever to prevent chafing. My skinny build means that generally nothing on me rubs together, so I rode with my shorts unbuttered. I did wear tight Spandex shorts rather than my usual baggies, making me look as much like the frou-frou cyclists I normally mock as I ever will.

I headed out. Mentally, I was carefully monitoring my condition, making sure I wasn't showing any signs of tiredness, making sure to keep hydrated. Yes, I was an endurance athlete in touch with my body's performance! Then I looked down and realized I had ridden only five miles. If I was going to obsess at this level it was going to be a long day. So I relaxed and rode on.

I rode all the way out to Purcellville (40ish miles) without any major stops. As is my wont, I took a lot of bathroom breaks along the way - an issue for me when I leave for a long period of exercise in the morning right after drinking my usual morning bucket of (decaf!) coffee. I did have to walk my bike for a bit at one point, as there was a crew repaving the trail, but with the reward of riding fresh, smooth pavement for a long stretch. Later on the trail was closed in another spot for maintenance work, but only for a short distance. Contrary to my usual experience, after a while I did start getting a little chafing in one spot as I rode. I found a way to tug my shorts into the right position after each time I stopped to minimize the issue, a little dance I wound up doing after every stop at a road crossing, water break, etc. I figured I might stop in at the bike shop that sits right at the end of the trail in Purcellville to get some of the body glide sort of stuff I had earlier eschewed.

Trail detour #1 

Trail detour #2

Surprise! The bike shop is no longer there. However, in its place is a nice little bakery. I went in and chatted with the young guy behind the counter who said he couldn't imagine doing a ride of the length I was on. After drooling over the carrot cake muffins and tasty looking scones, I opted for the relatively healthful yogurt/fruit/granola parfait and spent my first real break of the day on a park bench happily eating my yogurt. When I finished I spent a little stretching, during which time a group of guys rode up - retirees, by the looks of them. I chatted with them. They were from Maryland but had ridden only from Herndon. I, without an ounce of smugness, I swear! told them I had ridden all the way out from Arlington.

Having finished stretching and humbly asserting my superiority as a cyclist, I started back. I was mid-morning by this point and I started to think about lunch. It would be nice to make it all the way back to the Whole Foods in Vienna, but by my estimation I wouldn't get back there until around 2 PM, and I wanted to eat before that. I rode on, figuring out I would eat at some point when the opportunity presented itself - plus, I had a magic power-up up my sleeve.

While the W&OD is rolling, in general it's uphill on the way out and so I got treated to some nice downhill sections as I rode back. Fortunately, one of the work crews had finished for the day and so had to contend with only one detour. I felt pretty good when I hit the fifty mile point until I realized that it might be only my halfway point for the day - man, a century is a lot of time on the bike! As I approached Herndon (about 60 miles of riding) I decided I wanted to eat but wanted to keep it on the light side. So, rather than look for a real lunch somewhere I decided to stop at The Green Lizard bike shop/coffee bar and picked up an energy bar of some kind, plus the aforementioned power-up in the form of a cup of regular coffee. It's a well-documented fact that caffeine can improve exercise performance. I assiduously avoid caffeine these days and so on the rare occasions when I consume it it feels like a super-energy pill, or like Popeye's spinach. Yes, I was caffeine "doping" :) Anyway, at the Green Lizard I ate a protein Clif Bar of some sort and had a small latte, though I didn't even finish the latte because I was worried about consuming too much caffeine. I hadn't brought extra sunscreen with me, and so at this point I put on my arm sun protector sleeves. And then off I went, soon crossing the 62 mile threshold, from which point every inch would be a new personal record.

I had brought headphones with me because I figured that by this point I might be bored out of my skull, but somehow I just kind of got into the zone and never felt the need for distraction. There's always something to look at, and the miles kept ticking away. On the climb into Vienna I found myself moving pretty slowly. A guy came by and encouraged me to draft behind him - but I wanted to earn my miles. Plus, I have never drafted another cyclist and figured that seventy miles into a ride was the wrong time to start experimenting. About this time I got a few weird pains in my left knee. I geared down a little bit and fortunately the pains didn't continue.

I found myself reaching home at the eighty mile point, as expected. This was the big decision point - call it a day, or keep going? I rode up to the house, a dangerous proposition - it would be easy to quit once I was already home - but to tell you the truth, I was still feeling pretty good. I made myself a snack of peanut butter and jelly on multi-grain bread. I texted Valerie to tell her what I was up to and coordinate our plans for the evening, which yielded a typically non-committal "let's figure it out later" response. I filled my water bottle with nice cold water and headed out to continue riding. With eighty one miles under my belt a ride around the "Arlington Loop" would get me just about the mileage I needed. However, I really didn't want to ride the up-and-down up-and-down rolling hills of the Custis Trail, so I took the Custis only as far as Glebe Road and from there took Fairfax Drive/Clarendon Blvd. down into Rosslyn, where I picked up the Mount Vernon trail. I always love riding down the river and so my spirits were buoyed.

I made a quick detour into the Columbia Island Marina to use the bathroom (I swear, I visited every bathroom and Porta-potty along the whole route). There was a band playing at the marina bar, but I soldiered on. From there it was the Four Mile Run trail across to Shirlington, and finally the little eastern bit of the W&OD (miles 0 to 4.5) that I had missed when I headed west in the morning. That last bit of the W&OD is a slow, steady uphill and I'm embarrassed to admit how slowly I was going by that point - maybe 10 MPH. I had started to get a stomach ache and while I wasn't mentally spent, my body was getting tired.

As I hit mile 99 I bumped into cycling friend Erin heading the other way (on her way to the Friday night Crystal City Happy Hour, I surmised - correctly, it turned out). We waved. She of course had no idea that she was seeing me as I reached the end of my century ride but was very excited when she later learned that was the case.

I had been watching the mileage on my Garmin bike computer. When I got back to the neighborhood I was a fraction of a mile short and so I did some loops around the neighborhood before heading up to the house. As I pulled into the driveway the Garmin read 100.3 miles. Strava, always a little more generous, gave me an extra mile. I was pretty hungry at this point and felt like eating despite still having a stomach ache. I made myself some lemonade to which I added salt, and ate more multi-grain toast, this time with hummus. Mindful of the cardiologist's admonition to always cool down at the end of exercising I paced back and forth in the kitchen while my toast toasted, which is how Valerie found me when she got home. I probably looked a little crazy, but fortunately Valerie was excited for me for having achieved my century goal rather than just thinking I was a madman pacing our kitchen watching bread toast.

Final Garmin results

So, success! Stomach ache went away later that evening. Not too sore the next day (except saddle sore). And we did go to Crystal City that evening, where I got a lot of kudos from my friends for having ridden my first century.

Victory!

Now I'm one of the cool kids :)

Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/1640702587

Bike to Work Day

Five days of buckets of rain. The Potomac is near flood stage. Creeks are jumping their banks. The ground is so saturated that water just pools on the surface of lawns.

And we're out biking.

Today is Bike to Work Day. As a promotional thing, the Crystal City part of Arlington turns it into a week-long event, with a gathering every morning at the Crystal City Water Park. Best of all, if you show up all five days, you get a free bike jersey! Most of my morning coffee bike friends have collections of CC jerseys, so I was determined to get one this year. And then it rained. And rained, and rained. Every morning Monday through Thursday I bundled up in my rain gear and headed out the door before 6:30 AM to give myself time to bike to Crystal City, hang out and schmooze, and then still get to work at a reasonable time (detouring to Crystal City about doubles my commute from 6 to 12 miles). Thursday was the worst - drenching rain that eventually soaked my rain gear.

Friday I decided to embrace the wet. I donned a Hydroskin (sort of like a thin neoprene) kayaking top, high vis vest, bike shorts, and wateproof socks - gear intended to keep me warm, but not really dry - and headed out. It was so much more comfortable than stuffy rain gear! The fact that I didn't have to ultimately get to work helped - somehow I really didn't mind getting wet when I knew I didn't have any goal other than playing in the rain.

This guy has been out in the rain for too long (Falls Church)

First stop: Falls Church. I headed west from my house for about a mile to hit the Falls Church pit stop, hosted by the fun folks from Bikenetic, a popular local bike shop. Saw a number of friends from that crowd (people who race on bikenetic teams, participate in their shop rides, etc.): Cyndi, Casey, Dane, Liz, ... Not too much in the way of give-aways there; I turned down the offer of a industrial quality bagel, but did take a chocolate chip cookie for later. After hanging for a bit I turned around and headed east down the W&OD for 6-7 miles to ...

Shirlington

Second stop: Shirlington. The always sunny Kathy L was volunteering there, brightening up a rainy day. There were free baked goods from Best Buns, a favorite bakery of mine and the Wednesday gathering spot for the local cyclist morning coffee club. I grabbed a bran muffin (my usual order) and, at the urging of the staff, a slice of apple monkey bread (I think they figured they weren't going to get too big a crowd, given the weather, so they were eager to give out what they had brought). In fact, there weren't many people and not much swag other than the baked goods (I did get a water bottle). I chatted with (I don't know this woman's name) about how frustrating it is that all these stops have regular coffee but no decaf. I have been largely off caffeine since my surgery; she is recovering from a concussion and also has to avoid caffeine. I bid farewell and continued to ...

Crystal City Water Park

Third Stop: Crystal City. The girl with the concussion? She left Shirlington after I did, took the same route, never passed me, but was somehow already in line to check in at Crystal City when I got there. I know I'm a slow rider, but I can't figure out how she did it - unless the bump on the head gave her some sort of mutant teleportation powers. Josephine and Cassie were doing the check-ins. I got my Crystal City jersey!!! I also got the free BTWD t-shirt. Crystal City is one of the big pit stops, and there were lots of people there. I hung out for a while, chatted and picked up some small swag items (granola bar, banana) before continuing on to ...

Theodore Roosevelt Island parking lot, which wasn't supposed to be a stop but is where my rear tire went flat. Fortunately, TRI is really close both to the Rosslyn pit stop and my office. I walked my bike up into Rosslyn, figuring there might be bike mechanics at the Rosslyn pit stop willing to fix my flat and if not, I would duck into my office building to fix my flat out of the rain.

The Conte's mechanic both fixing and breaking my bike

Rosslyn

Fourth Stop: Rosslyn. This is a super big stop with lots of booths. Sure enough, there were some bike shops there offering free mechanic services. The Conte's bike shop mechanic fixed my flat for free, which was nice. Unfortunately, he also put my wheel back on crooked. When I took my bike back I realized that the brakes were rubbing. He grabbed it back and rather than straighten the wheel he adjusted the brakes, leaving me with an off-center wheel and misaligned brakes (though I didn't realize this at the time). I strolled the booths and availed myself of the great swagathon that is the Rosslyn pit stop: another water bottle, CO2 cartridge, patch kit, energy bars, another BTWD t-shirt (for Valerie), bike socks - gosh, I lost track of it all. I have to admit, I had left home with an empty back pack to make sure I had ample swag carrying capacity, and I made use of it at Rosslyn! I bumped into Henry, Chris W., Chris R., Erin, Robyne, Rimas and Ken. By this point it was getting on 9 AM, the end-time for most of the pit stops. Some people were planning to head on into DC to the Wharf area, where there was a pit stop that stayed open until 10 AM, but I decided to head towards home, figuring I'd make one more stop, since I would pass by the Ballston pit stop along the way. Ken asked if he could ride with me, since he wanted to visit the Ballston stop but didn't know where it was. So I continued on to ...

Ballston with Ken and SteveO

Fifth stop: Ballston. Since I was riding with Ken, I hustled up the hill out of Rosslyn at a faster than usual, heart-pumping pace so as not to be too much of a slowpoke. Ken and I got to Ballston to find that, as expected, they were packing up. There we ran into SteveO, who had been volunteering but was getting ready to leave. SteveO lives right near me and so the three of us continued on together. The trails were populated with familiar faces - we saw Kurt up ahead of us, easily recognizable by his recumbent bike, and then Cynthia (a tiny little woman who rides like a demon) caught us, exchanged greetings and then passed us by.

At the Bluemont caboose Ken broke off for home (Alexandria) while SteveO and I finished our last bit of the W&OD trail. As we were getting off the trail my bike started feeling squishy again. Sure enough, my rear brake was rubbing again and in addition, I was getting another flat tire - this time, the front wheel. I managed to limp the last few blocks home, where I set aside my bike to dry (to be cleaned and fixed later) spread out and admired my swag collection, and finished off the thermos of decaf I had been toting around and sipping all morning, along with the monkey bread from Shirlington.

Swag!

Did I bike to work? Not exactly - I'm not even working today. Did I bike to my workplace? Absolutely! Did I have fun? Absolutely, again!

Metric Century!

Since my surgery I have changed my exercise habits. I used to do some form of intense exercise (running, rowing, etc.) every other day, with recovery days in between. Now I exercise almost every day, and generally for a longer duration, but the exercise is less intense. But sometimes I still push it.

I am not a fast cyclist, nor will I ever be one, but I have been curious about what kind of distance I can bike if I put myself to the test. Last month I had a 43 mile day when I participated in the VASA ride. Yesterday I decided to see if I could push that a little bit: to 50 miles, and maybe to a "metric century" (100 km, or 62 miles). I started from home and planned a 25 mile ride west, which would get me back home with a round trip distance of 50 miles (plus had ways to get home by Metro if I pooped out early). Then, if I felt like I still had some gas in the tank when I got home, I'd head east down to the bottom of the W&OD trail, and that extra round-trip would take me to 62 miles.

I have to say, I was inspired by two cyclists I chatted with at a happy hour on Weds night: one a breast cancer survivor, and the other a 30-something (or thereabouts) woman with a jaw-dropping history of serious medical conditions who is a healthy and powerful mountain bike racer. The two of them have said "F*ck you" to their diseases and have gotten on with life.

Here's how my ride went:

7:00 AM - Planned start time. Busy emailing - I just can't seem to get out the door on time if I don't have a hard deadline.

7:30 - Still puttering around the house.

8:00 - Actual start time.

9:20 - Bathroom break at Bready Park in Herndon. Also take time to adjust the seat on my bike to try and dial in the fit a little (this is the first long ride on a new bike)

9:30 - The seat is really uncomfortable. Stop again to re-adjust. Much better.

10:25 Reach my turn-around point, cleverly timed so my turning point is also where I take my first real break - to dial into a 10:30 conference call for work. Use the five minutes I have left before the call to turn around and bike back a little to a spot where I had seen a covered park bench - a good place to take the call.

10:30 - Dial into the call.

10:40 - See an older guy walking along the trail a few hundred feet away suddenly keel over and disappear into the small gully alongside the trail. Should I drop the call and run over to help!? Two other cyclists closer to him have seen it too and stop to offer aid. They help the guy up. He seems alright.

10:50 - The guy continues his walk and when he gets to where I am, sits down on the bench where I'm talking. When my call finishes I talk to him for a bit. He's OK - just lost his balance while leaning over to look at a a turtle alongside the trail. He was very concerned that the turtle was going to try and cross the trail and get smushed.

10:55 - He continues east. I bike west to where the turtle is to have a look. The poor thing is all up in its shell. I turn around and as I pass the guy I tell him the turtle is OK, just apparently frightened. He's still concerned about the turtle crossing the trail. We part ways and I start my ride back in earnest.

11:30 - I stop at Green Lizard Cycling / Coffee shop alongside the trail in Herndon and have an iced non-fat decaf latte (such is my life - no caffeine, no fat, no fun) and a Stroopwafel (after checking the packages of all the flavors to see which one has the least fat).

12:15 PM - Lunch break at the Whole Foods alongside the trail in Vienna (salad, Asian noodles, iced green tea - which might have had some caffeine). Continue riding east ...

1:30 - Back at my starting point. 50 miles done. Continue? Yes!! Carefully watching the trip odometer on my bike computer, I ride just far enough down the trail to ensure a round trip of 62 miles.

1:55 - Reach final turnaround point.

2:00 - Another coffee break. Decaf double espresso and a chocolate chip cookie (a real indulgence!). Continue onto the final leg. It's a hot afternoon and I tell the barista my grandfather's theory that you should drink hot drinks on hot days to cool yourself off (drinking a hot drink makes you perspire more, and perspiration cools you off).

2:48 - Arrive home. As I pull into the driveway my mileage reads 62.2, which means I have ridden 100.1 km.

Talking business

3:00 - Valerie arrives home and I when I tell her about my ride I get that "I'm so happy you're this healthy again" / "You're a lunatic" combination look I know all too well.

3:30 - I am in the bath, soaking my sore muscles (and something else I won't elaborate on here).

4:00 - Nap

4:30- I begin calculating how to step up my mileage on subsequent rides to get me to a full "century" (100 miles).

The next morning: I awaken feeling fine. Not really sore, except for the previously unmentioned problem. Spend a few hours doing yard work without any ill effect. F*ck you, heart disease - I'm charting a path to a century ride.



Strava link: https://www.strava.com/activities/1549534371