Vacation/Adventure

The last of my blackened toenails from our hike in Italy fell off about 4 days before we started our latest vacation/adventure - biking the C & O Canal towpath.  That seemed very Asian – representing the balance and symmetry of life or something like that.  As for vacation/adventures, discovering a new ice cream parlor on vacation is a big enough adventure for me.  Paul, however, sees the words “vacation” and “adventure” as synonyms and neither has anything to do with ice cream cones.

I actually was the one who suggested this particular vacation/adventure.  We had biked some sections of the towpath in the past and I thought it would be nice to revisit it for a week.  Conceived by Washington, promoted by Jefferson and opened in the 1830’s, the C & O Canal was supposed to provide a waterway to transport goods between the Washington, D.C. area and the Ohio River at Pittsburgh.  It reached Cumberland, Maryland 185 miles from Washington before it stalled out, bankrupt and upstaged by the railroads.  In the 1950’s, Supreme Court Justice Douglas saved the remains of the canal from becoming a paved road, creating our longest and narrowest National Park.  The towpath, once used by the mules pulling boats along the canal, is now a packed-dirt and gravel path for walking and biking that passes classic old canal and railroad towns.

Some people drive to a town and stay there for a few days biking the canal and sightseeing before driving to the next town.  You can probably guess which one of us would have been fine with that and which one wanted something more edgy.  So, I mapped out a plan to leave our car about 1/3 of the way into the towpath and bike from there to Washington, D.C. and back, without the car.  I had a bailout plan where, after a few days, if the weather was bad, we could return to our car and use it for the second half of the trip.  Realistically, a combination typhoon, monsoon, tsunami and hurricane would have been the only perfect storm leading to that outcome.

We attached a little trailer named Bob to the back of the bike; Bob holds a good sized duffle bag of stuff.  The duffle, however, turned out to be shockingly heavy when we loaded it up for the first time.  While waiting out a thunderstorm, we thought about what to leave behind.  When the weather cleared, I ditched one biking outfit, extra shorts, my writing tablet and a pair of shoes.  I chose between a bottle of wine and liquid soap (not a hard choice) and gave up half a package of fig bars and half my Kashi bars – at least they weren’t Oreos.  We decided to share deodorant and Paul took out some of his stuff. When I was packing his 5-pound shoes, he asked me three times if I really needed my 2 ounce bottle of make-up and my LITTLE containers of special shampoo, conditioner and gel. (YES! YES! and YES!)  I offered to compare the total weight of his stuff against mine but we didn’t have a scale. By the end of the trip, I had used every last sock and he still had a bag of unused clothes.  HA!

A few days before we were to leave, I wondered if we had made a bad choice with all this year’s rain and flooding.  In a canal website blog posting, some guy complained that the rocky, bumpy, muddy trail limited his speed to about 5 miles an hour, gave him flat tires and eventually caused him to bail out.  He also ran out of water because he thought the Park Service water pump was unsafe since there was a dead deer lying in the water nearby.  (“A First Class Weenie!” according to Paul.)  My friend Jean said her butcher’s son found dead fish everywhere along the canal and one gigantic one (I visualized Moby Dick) in the middle of the towpath.  But by then we were already committed.

 

As usual, my worries were unnecessary. By the time we started our trip, the flood waters had receded, most parts of the trail had been repaired and rolled smooth and we didn’t see a dead fish anywhere.  There were some bumps, a few limbs across the trail and enough muddy spots to leave my legs and Paul’s yellow biking shirt looking like cheetah wannabees but that didn’t hold us back.  We had peaceful, pleasant rides each day past scenic dams, locks, and lock houses often with the canal on one side and the Potomac River on the other.   The canal itself ranged from placid water to murky swamp to grass and trees; while the Potomac was wide and smooth in some areas and dotted with rocks and rapids in others.  Our wildlife sightings included a blacksnake, red fox, turtles, woodchucks, an eagle, egrets and herons, a weasel and many deer which are much cuter when they’re eating something besides Paul’s perennials. It was great biking, even the one day when we rode about 75 miles without so much as one square of chocolate.

We spent our nights in beautiful, out-of-the –way places including Georges Mill Farm (left) which has been in the same family for nine generations and the Jacob Rohrbach Inn, a large, comfortable house built in 1804 and used during the Civil War as a field hospital (photo with paragraph 4.)  We also stayed in two of the old lock houses – the one was furnished in a 1950’s style complete with an Ike and Mamie Eisenhower commemorative plate while the other, our favorite, transported us back to the 1830’s, offering tranquility, a vintage kitchen and a lovely front porch view in place of air conditioning (photos paragraph 5.) 

A big advantage of biking between 30 and 70 miles every day is that you can devour things like berry bread pudding and lemon pancakes and croissant omelets for breakfast.  You can put down a three-inch thick deli sub for lunch.  You can sample crab cakes everywhere – in Maryland, crab cakes are like pastrami in New York or brats in Milwaukee or chili in Cincinnati.  You can enjoy a cone at Nutter’s Ice Cream Store; but you should know that “small” means two large scoops and, if you order Java Chunk, you’d better have a good book with you. 

If you’re Paul, you can even flirt with the idea of eating The Monument at Captain Bender’s in Sharpsburg – “Three 8 ounce Black Angus burger patties stacked high on a Kaiser roll with lettuce and tomato.  Layered with chili, cheese, hot sauce, fried pickles, onion rings and spicy dipping sauce.  Served with a dill pickle spear and cheese fries topped with bacon and sour cream.”  It costs $28.24, but if you eat the whole thing, it’s free.  Paul considered it until our friendly bartender/waiter warned him that most people, who plow through the burger, hit the wall when it comes to the fries.  You could also go on a bender with one of Captain Bender’s signature drinks like Canal Water (Melon Liquor, pineapple juice and Sprite) or a Duck Shot (a duck decoy filled with 12 ounces of beer and a shot of amaretto.)

Our luck with the weather lasted all week – the bike was in the van, our massive bag of dirty clothes was stowed away, Paul was in the shower and I was relaxing on the porch of the 1828 Trail Inn in Hancock, Maryland when it started to rain.  I had hoped the benefits of biking 300 miles in a week might include sculpted, rock-hard calves or a few less pounds in my bike shorts or no more Saggy Baggy Elephant staring at me when I do leg lifts. That part didn’t work out.  After all this was a week-long bike trip, not a miracle makeover; and I wasn’t exactly living on non-fat yogurt and birdseed.  Still it was a wonderful vacation and a wonderful adventure. We’ve started thinking about other long trips with just us, the bike and Bob.

 

It Was A Very Good Year

Almost a year ago, I was having lunch with my friend Barbara when I got the phone call from David – he and Megan were off to the hospital for the birth of our grandson Willem.  We were in Brooklyn last weekend so I can offer a first-hand update on the stellar progress of this remarkable, affectionate, brilliant, charming, exceptional and wonderful baby.

When he was about two weeks old, Megan nicknamed him “The Boss,” as in “I have to get off the phone now – The Boss wants to eat.”  A year later, he is still “His Bossiness” and is more likely to answer to “Hey, Boss” than to “Hey, Willem.”  He has been photographed so much that, when the camera comes out, so does his smile.

Here is what Willem has mastered: speed crawling, playing the guitar, picking up Cheerios off the floor and standing without help. He is also the youngest person to achieve Platinum status with the airlines, having completed ten round-trips, all without buying a single ticket.  Here is what he has not mastered: walking, doing anything with a cup but waving it around, and using a spoon, at least not a spoon with anything in it.  Learning to escape from his crib is at the top of his bucket list.

Willem marks his territory by drooling on couch pillows, piano pedals, carpets, everybody’s shoes, and the laptop, when he can get at it.  He finds satisfaction for the mind and for the mouth in board books like “Going on a Bear Hunt,” “The Subway” and my personal favorite, “There’s a Wocket in My Pocket.”  He has graduated to Size 3 diapers and turned diaper changing into an aerobic exercise for both the changer and the changee. 

So far, he has sampled purple carrots, a variety of fruit and vegetable (???) flavored yogurts, bananas, provolone cheese, bagels, pizza and bacon (thanks to my mother, aka Granny – who else?)  He has graduated from sucking on apple slices to scraping off apple bits with his four and a half teeth.  Willem tried strawberries with such bad results that he will probably wait until he gets to high school to order strawberry pie.  As far as I know, he has not sampled Chicken McNuggets, Steak tartare, Brussels Sprouts or Graeters ice cream.  I also don’t think there were any jelly beans in his Easter basket either.

By the way, at mealtimes, he enjoys background music by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.  He recently discovered that, if you really want to have fun at breakfast, you can lean over the side of your high chair and do the raspberries with a mouthful of Yo Baby yogurt.

Willem’s toys have crowded out most of his dad’s guitar equipment and most of his mom’s photographic equipment.  He has made short work of the houseplants.  His accumulated menagerie of quirky, huggable stuffed animals includes a big yellow duck, a lion, a giraffe, a stegosaurus and a cow with bright pink udders - none of which talks, thank goodness.  He does not own a kid piano, a drum or finger paints although he does have a remote control – without batteries. 

Willem’s clothes are covered with steam shovels, cars, cement mixers, dinosaurs and guitars and his socks have monster fangs on the heels – clearly he is not in touch with his feminine side yet.  He owns half a dozen adorable little pairs of shoes and some Joe Cool sunglasses so he’s ready for a big summer of picking up girls in Prospect Park.

He makes a lot of noises and is headed in the direction of saying important stuff like “Mama” and “Dada.”  “NeNeNeNe” is one of his favorite things to say and I was all set to trade in “Nana” for “Nene” until I remembered that, in the crosswords, “nene” is some sort of a Hawaiian goose.  I decided to pass on being “Nene” because geese are loud and disgusting and I don’t look good in a grass skirt.

Last Friday, we got to see Willem with other kids his age at his weekly music class.  It was lots of fun.  Pete, the teacher played the guitar and led songs and activities with plenty of movement and rhythm.  Pete also collected the musical instruments at the end using two baskets – one for the dry shakers and bells and cymbals and another for the wet ones.  Anyway, we’re not sure if Willem is the most musically gifted kid in the class but he is unquestionably the baldest – ditto for the toddler playground. 

Speaking of the toddler playground, anyone who knew David as a kid or has known Paul at any stage of his life will not be surprised to learn that Willem goes up the slide rather than down. He was as unmoved by a loud “NO” from a little girl with red curls as Dennis the Menace is by Margaret.  At home, Willem is watching for an opportunity to climb inside the dishwasher simply because, like Everest, “it is there.”

So, it has been a busy and exciting year for Willem and for all of us who are watching him grow and change.  It’s impossible to predict what he will experience and accomplish in the coming year although the photos below may offer a hint. By the way, Megan took the first two photos in this post, I took a few and Paul took most of then, including the four at the end of the post.