Biking and Hiking and Kayaking: Be Careful Out There

Huge Caterpillars, All Girl Drum Lines - Typical Day in Baltimore

Well, I'm now in week 5 of post-rotator cuff surgery rehab, and my weekend routine has changed quite a bit. No 50 mile bike rides or 2 hour kayak outings for some time to come, though I'm hoping that in early June I'll be cleared to at least get back on a stationary  bike. 

I can still walk and hike, so I'm doing lots of that. This past Saturday Carole and I decided to go up to Baltimore and walk around and see the annual Kinetic Sculpture Race put on by the American Visionary Art Museum, one of our favorite places to go in Baltimore.

The event doesn't really start until about 0930, but we got up early, drove up to Federal Hill , parked and went to a really nice place for coffee and breakfast:

 

Whoops, not JavaDivas in Anne Arundel County, haven't taken Carole there yet. I meant Spoons:

After a great breakfast at this eclectic place (where else is there snow in Baltimore in May??), we headed down to the Museum area where the Race entrants were staging for the start. As we walked over from Federal Hill we could hear a very strong drum beat.

That turned out to be a women's group out of Washington DC, Batala. Very cool - must have been a great work out, as they played for over an hour non-stop. This was followed by a guy dressed as a nun, who got up and did the ritual "blessing of the feet."

Then, the race began - well, it is more like a parade of art objects that are built around bicycles, Clorox bottles, old coolers, lots of crepe paper and a variety of tchotckes. They "race" aound Baltimore along a 14 mile course that includes (for some) a brief try at floating in the Inner Harbor, and getting though an obstacle course in Patterson Park.

The first challenge is getting up Federal Hill in the first half mile - a third of them don't get past that. Carole and I climbed up the hill t watch, pictures below. This is one of the most fun events in Baltimore.

This guy didin't get the memo - I think there was supposed to be some form of propulsion, other than FFP - Fred Foot Power. But they let him join in.

During the "race" this elephant kept "mooing" and I'm not sure what the green women represented, either.

The hookah caterpillar could book - there were something like 6 people pedaling bicycles under there.

Mutually Assured Destruction - kinetic sculpture style.

A worrisome sight in your rearview mirror.

A Compendium of Appalachian Trail Hikes

Over the past several weeks, Carl and I have cycled back towards hiking segments of the Maryland Appalachian trail in 6-7 mile segments. Since the AT is a long linear trail, the hikes were either eco-friendly one car out and backs, or OPEC-friendly two car one way hikes, generally working our way north along Maryland's 30 miles or so of the AT.

I will let pictures provide the proverbial thousands of words.

The southern-most segment of the AT in Maryland is really on the C&O Towpath from Harpers Ferry to Weverton Cliffs. At the starting point, Carl noticed a weird transmogrification machine that turned his head into a cyclops robot when he got too close to it.

At the Harpers Ferry end you reach the old tunnel that now has a chain link fence keeping you out, since it is an active rail line, but years ago you used to be able to walk right in.

An artist's rendering of the C&O Towpath, which runs from Washington DC to Cumberland MD and then turns into the Allegheny Passage Trail that runs all the way to Pittsburgh, PA.

North on the AT brings you to Gathland State Park with a bunch of old buildings. This is one.

North of Gathland you come to Lamb's Knoll and a nice viewpoint of the snow-free hills we have had all winter long this year.

About 3 miles north of Lamb's Knoll you cross Reno Monument Road with a bunch of official Civil War monuments, but there is an odd side path that takes to into the woods to the above, very odd Confederate memorial. Apparently "Deo Vindice" means "God Will Vindicate" and was the motto of the Confederacy, but I'm pretty sure vindication did not come to the slave-holding side of that war.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." In keeping with RWE's wisdom, we randomly hiked up by Liberty Reservoir, which for the past several years has been at low water levels due to near-drought conditions here. However, we've had a lot of rain and the dam has an impressive spillover. Carl and I did some "pay it forward" as some hikers passed us in the opposite direction. Carl spotted some crumpled up $20 bills on the path, and the little angels on our shoulders quickly pummeled the little devils on the other shoulders into submission and we gave the grateful hikers back their money. I later found a coupon for a free Egg McMuffin, which for me is probably really the little devil's revenge.

We Have It All: Goats on the Applachian Trail and Giant Pulsing Rotator Cuffs

A goat on the Appalachian Trail (the one not in the baggy red and blue outfit)

It was right chilly in the DC area this past weekend, with temperatures in the low 20s - and the hawk was out, with wind gusts in the 30 mph range. Carl and I decided to return to hiking the Appalachian Trail and did an old favorite: the seven mile section from Gathland State Park down to Weverton Cliff overlooking the Potomac River.

In the pre-smart phone days, we both would have been carrying cameras but these days the camera in the phone is about it. About 4 miles into the hike up ahead I saw what I thought was someone hiking with llamas - unusual, but not unheard of in exotic places like Peru or Burkittsville, MD. Carl pointed out llamas don't have long beards, and that there were no hikers nearby the two animals.

Centaurs, maybe? We got within about 15 feet of them and it became obvious they were some very fancy goats, the kind that could win their category at the Westminster Goat Show. They were blocking the Trail and were looking at us while making chewing motions. Most of my knowledge of goats comes from watching Bugs Bunny cartoon and I assumed they were seeing us as giant tin cans, since  cartoon goats always ate tin cans. Or they were measuring the angle to our rear ends, as another common outcome between goats and people seems to be the goats butting the people in their nether regions and the people flying through the air - in the cartoons, anyway.

Turns out they were probably just looking to see if we had any goat food we were going to give them, or if we were there to end their vacation out in the wild and take them back to whatever Olde Goate Farme they had escaped from. Carl fumbled around for 10 minutes to get his smart phone out, turn the camera and actually take a picture - as you see above by then the goats had moved off the trail and in the picture all you can see is a shape that that vaguely resembles some kind of large dog.

Cell phone cameras make the most awesome outdoor pictures just meh. I guess if we could have gotten the alleged goats to sit still for a face shot, much better.

A close up of the shoulder of some old goat.

Now, at the opposite end of the photography resolution spectrum is the MRI machine. A bit hard to carry around when you hike, but apparently if you damage your rotator cuff and it doesn't improve, doctors want a picture. A cellphone picture, not so much - noooooooo! They want to strap you to one of those giant machines that you see on House and all the medical shows, put a giant hoop around your shoulder and have this machine ingest you after first giving you all kinds of contradicting warnings about how bad it will be, even though you shouldn't worry because it is not that bad, even though it looks really bad.

After a lot of humming and clicking and clacking and weird, actually painful pulsing in my shoulder, they let me out and gave me a CD with pictures on it - it was just like the log flume ride at Great Adventure! I went home and loaded the CD onto my PC - and the Chinese hackers immediately stole all my passwords so do not open any attachments I may have sent you...

 

Dodging Nemo and CIA Mind Rays, Strolling Sugarloaf, Hoofing Font Hill

The Washington Post reports that it has been 722 days since the DC area had snowfall greater than 1 inch. Global warming continued to be our friend, as this weekend Snow Thingie Nemo blasted New England with a few feet of snow and we got bupkus. Since I 'm currently dealing with a torn rotator cuff, no tears for lack of snow here.

Lack of snow, of course, is bad for ski slopes and body work shops but good for hiking. Carl and I revisited Sugarloaf Mountain on Sunday, doing a wussified variation of our usual 6 mile loop that avoided two of the three peaks and instead traversed a streamside trail between those peaks. The heavy rains of last week left lots of evidence of strong runoff and lots of crunchy mud to plod across.  The beautiful blue sky counterbalanced Carl's grumbling about building a software defined radio kit that had numerous eensy beensy surface mount devices that needed to be soldered onto a circuit board.

I saw Carl's whining, and raised it with my own complaining about the garage door opener I installed almost 10 years ago having problems hearing the remotes. After changing batteries and replacing remotes I decided it had to be the receiver logic board. As soon as Amazon emailed me that my credit card had been charged and the new board was on the way, all remotes started working again. I am sure this was either: (1) CIA mind rays at work; (2) the new smart meters causing interference; or (3) solar flares. I'm leaning towards (1), as I noticed there have been many "Comcast" white vans working in the neighborhood recently - as if Comcast ever actually had repair crews out...

Since the Sugarloaf hike was not all that challenging, later that afternoon Carole and went out and checked out the paths around Font Hill Park. I drive by there a lot and it always looked inviting. Only about 1 mile of paths, but the County claims there are 53 species of dragonflies and 7 species of amphibians (who I guess have a very varied dragonfly diet, since Font Hill appears to be the Baskin Robbins of dragonflies.) All we saw was the ubiquitous Asian walking couples which can be found bundled up and carrying walking sticks in pretty much every park on every weekend.

When we got home, Lauren had decided to grace us with a visit, grumbling that we didn't wait for her to use the Safeway points to gas up the cars but as usual brightening up the house in her unique Lauren kind of way.

Any weekend where the driveway and sidewalks don't need to be shoveled and the garage door fixes itself, and where you can gas up your car without having to pay for your daughter's gas is a good weekend.

John's work blog is here.

Superbowl Sunday Snow Strolling Amongst Man Eating Ants

On Super bowl Sunday morning, Carl and I decied to hike Little Bennett Regional Park in Gaithersburg. The park has an extensive, if not particularly challenging trail system. The area was hit by 3 inches of rain and flooded last week, then froze over after several Alberta Clippers moved through. The hiking alternated between mud and sheet ice a good portion of the time.

 

Several miles in you come across the remains of Wims Field, an baseball field used by a Negro baseball league many years ago. A mile or so after that the trails converge to an area where you have to ford a river, but with all the rain and snow the water level was too high. So, we backtracked  and decided the brave the dreaded Ant Mound trail.

The trail is lined with giant ant mounds and common sense would say that, even in the cold of winter, you should avoid the voracious little beasts. But, no - inquisitive Carl had to investigate the makings of one of the mounds while I stopped to tie my boots ...

When turned around he was gone - nothing was left but a single Michael Jackson-like glove on one of the ant mounds, and his wallet containing his latest retirement checks. Oh, well - I grabbed the checks and bravely soldiered on.

Later, at Mike and Kathy's Superbowl Party, the New Orleans Superdome held a 37 minute long moment of darkness to memorialize Carl - one minute of blackout for each of ant hills along the notorious Ant Mound Trail.

My work blog can be found here.