Years ago, I was in the market for a mountain bike. I went to the old Spin Cycle in Cary, picked out a bike, asked if I could take it for a test ride. Sure, they said. Plenty of residential streets behind the store: knock yourself out.
Trouble was, it was a mountain bike; riding it on asphalt wouldn’t give me much of a feel for how it handled rocky, rooty trail. Fortunately, I knew of some of the later weaving between the former. I returned a half hour later with a dirt covered bike — which I wound up buying.
The point: for a big-ticket item that’s performance-based, buying it sight-untested is silly. Yet we do it all the time with our outdoor gear. With kayaks, for instance.
The good news?
With a boat, that needn’t necessarily be the case. Great Outdoor Provision Co. sponsors boat demo days in its main markets in North Carolina and Virginia where you’re welcome to come and compare and contrast a variety of boats.
Intrigued? Learn more about demoing a kayak at this blog we wrote in partnership with Great Outdoor Provision.read more
Memorial Day weekend: it may not technically be summer’s meteorological kick off (that comes at 6:34 p.m. on June 20), but it certainly kicks off the season in our psyche. And the weather should be good for kicking if off in any number of adventurous ways, including …read more
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.read more
On a weekend that may be wet in spots but will also be cool (and who knows how much longer this will last?), we’re advocating exploring by foot. At the coast, you can truly get away from it all (on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail’s Coastal Crescent route). In the Piedmont, it may be your last chance for a cool-weather hike. And in the mountains, you have a chance to sample a 54-mile route you probably don’t know exists.read more
Early on, I made my living as a writer telling readers about places to go and explore. I still do that, but three years ago I thought it might be fun to actually take people to the places I wrote about. That experience has been more rewarding than I could have imagined. In part, that’s because many of the people I take out are my age — 60 — or olderread more
