this is not a comment on faith. literally, heathrow has an interesting ceiling!

very happy.
now i have everything to take w me on the qatar air flight.  yellow bag is stashed at the left baggage counter.
americans call it luggage and treat it as if it were an accessory.  americans take lots of it. brits call it baggage, which is exactly what it is on a trip. brits take far less of it.
heading now into central london on a train to kill time before the next flight. 

Dulles security…worse than usual

Rachel and Sara drove me to Dulles. I absolutely love travelling with a backpack for a carry-on and wearing hiking boots. The trip always turns out good.

yes i love napoleon dynamite too.  i didn’t the first time through but after another four or five times it’s awesome.
back to the subject. rachel and i are spending the weekend@  wintergreen just putzing around. at the moment i’m getting my droid set up to communicate from nepal, in particular being able to update this blog and include a few pictures. there’s supposed to be wifi some places along the way.
so this is a test. and yes this condo has a killer view!

I feel like I know the trails in the Old Rag & White Oak Canyon area like the back of my hand. Since I’m on the computer so much, I see the backs of my hands a lot so that really means something. Let’s stop the simile there and move on.

Having hiked in the same area all spring and summer, almost every weekend, and covering up to 20 miles in a day, it sometime seems there aren’t many new places to discover. I try to include one new segment each time, but some parts are common to all routes and many are to most.

The hiking is both a joy and a chore. The real goal is to train for EBC, so these are training hikes. (remember “Yuri the trainer who trains”) I push myself and often don’t stop for more than one 15 minute break the whole day to eat a sandwich and purify another couple of liters of water. Snacks and drinks are taken on the move. I try, and succeed, in overtaking almost everyone that I see. That is the chore part.

The joy part is that regardless, this is still Shenandoah National Park and the forests, mountains, and views are spectacular. The fungi are in all colors imaginable. It is a different world. There are very few hikers in most places. On some trails, I may have been the only person there all day owing to the fact that I am breaking spider webs late in the afternoon. Hiking as far as I do, instead of individual trails I see the park as an interconnected network of segments that can be pieced together and approached in many different orders. That is what keeps it interesting.

It will be sometime after I return from Nepal that Park will again become a place to wander through, at a normal place, with family and friends.

For me the word “shoeless” is always followed by “Joe Jackson”. Jackson, allegedly illiterate, was part of the Chicago Black Sox scandal, was banned from baseball, and also still holds the third highest career batting average in baseball history. In 1911 he hit .408 which is the sixth highest single season average ever.

What does this have to do with hiking? This pair of pink Crocs.

This was one of the few hikes I didn’t do alone. My friend Tom, an avid (and very fast) hiker, came with me and we returned by way of the summit of Robertson Mountain. Neither of us had been on that trail before. It was deserted, and wound its way up through a heavily forested area with many colors of lichens on large rocks and trees. There was a small area at the top with a great view of the valley. As it was cool and misting, we didn’t stay long at the top.

On the way back, along a fire road, we found these pink Crocs.  I know there’s a story. I want to believe it is something less mundane that falling off someone’s daypack. She lost them running from a bear. She left them as a clue of where to find her. He didn’t want his friends to know he wore pink Crocs. Maybe you have a better one.

We stopped at Gadino cellars on the way back for a tasting. A small group was playing great music on the back porch so we ordered another glass and enjoyed another fitting finish to a long hike.

Sperryville is a truly astounding place!

While I knew it was a gateway to the Shenandoah National Park as well as a picturesque little Virginia town, and I should have known it had so many wineries in the vicinity, my extracurricular activities after today’s hike took me to Copper Fox distillery and Mt. Vernon farm.

At the Copper Fox, they make Wasmunds’s single malt and Copper Fox rye whiskey. Their equipment is a cross between your grandfather’s science project and a hillbilly still. They keep referring tongue in cheek on the tour to their ‘state of the art’ equipment but really, what does it matter? Make the mash, heat it up, catch the condensate, and age it. And add art to the process. This place is great.  Some Virginia law prohibits them doing tastings, so they do ‘nosings’. They apparently are on the menu in lots of upscale downtown restaurants. And it’s right here in Sperryville. http://www.copperfox.biz/

Around the next corner, I was drawn down a gravel road to Mt. Vernon farm, advertising grass fed meats and some other organic items. It was not a waste of time. The store is one room in an outbuilding with a couple of freezers for the meat and some shelves for jams and eggs (when they have them). The young lady who owns the farm with her husband is also the photo editor for Flavor, a regional food magazine which, again, is based out of Sperryville. Her husband used to be a chef at the Inn at Little Washington. I picked up a couple of steaks, a dozen free range eggs, and a jar of blackberry jam.

http://www.mountvernonfarm.net/index.html

http://flavormagazinevirginia.com/

The title makes me think of ‘a beer and a bump’, from Lake Wobegone. Down at the Side Track Tap with the Norwegian bachelor farmers. Garrison Keillor was better back in the day.

Driving out to Sperryville for my second training hike I noticed there were a lot of wineries on the way. Wineries that in the 30 or so years of living in Virginia I’ve never visited. So why not combine a long hike with a visit to a different one of them each time on the way home?

The first one was the closest one to Old Rag, namely, Sharp Rock vinyard. They have a B&B too. These are not fancy places like the ones we’d visit growing up in California. I didn’t expect the wine to even be very good. But the fact it was local made it interesting and worth supporting.

After about 15 miles up Old Rag Mountain, down Berry Hollow, part way up White Oak Canyon and then back to the car on a day in the upper 80s, I traded boots for flip flops, put on a clean shirt, and drove over to Sharp Rock. The tasting room was on the second floor of what seemed to have been an old barn, with worn wooden floors, and just the kind of feeling you would hope for. I did the sampling and settled on a bottle of surprisingly good dry rose, reminiscent of the Loire valley ones, good for chilling and drinking with a relaxed weekend meal with relaxed weekend friends. I also bought a bottle of Chamois Rouge (much better than the “Old Rag Red”) which was enjoyable as long as you kept the perspective of where it came from and why you bought it.

Score one for a hike and a winery.

I like the default header that WordPress puts on the first sample post, “hello world’. The birth of a blog for better or for worse.

I’m headed to Nepal in October to hike to Everest Base Camp. It’s the closest I’ll get to the summit, at least from the Nepal side. It’s that Khumbu icefall thing. Maybe I can go higher from the Tibet side. A topic for another day. A topic for another wife, too.

Our outfitter is Mountain Madness. The same one of “Into Thin Air” fame. The trip is paid for. No trip insurance for this one…I am going. The plane reservation is in place. Most of the stuff is bought or rented. The boots are well worn in, but not worn out. Now it’s training, training, training.

The next few posts will catch up on this summer’s hikes and get back to realtime.

P.S. The header picture on the website is a panorama from near the top of Old Rag Mountain in Virginia.

This is going to be awesome!