With few exceptions, I experience what I write about. It makes it easier to describe the experience. It also makes it easier to sniff out the potential BS factor. This comes in especially handy when writing about new fitness trends and classes. It came in handy a couple weeks back when I started reporting a story on Chi Running for the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer.
This late summer weekend the great hiking is at the coast and the paddle festival is in the mountains. Crazy, eh?
Coast
Think fall hiking and you typically think of the coast. But Saturday at 10:30 one of the weekend’s best guided hikes will be at the Rachel Carson Reserve. Sponsored by the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort, the hike is a rare opportunity to learn about life on this barrier island.
Explore Cherry Point via a triathlon, participate in the VIII Lake Lure Olympiad or try your hand (and feet and sense of balance) with yoga on a paddleboard. Just another summer weekend in North Carolina.
Coast
I’m partial to events on military bases, in part because it gives civilians such as myself access to the otherwise inaccessible, to a world we otherwise don’t get a chance to see. That exposure is compounded when the event is a triathlon, which lets you run and ride through these forbidden lands.
The latest word from the field, via the ever-reliable Michael Bowers, a longtime greenway aficionado, is that the House Creek Greenway in Raleigh is pretty much open: “I rode across the bridge” — for the last couple of months the greenway’s lone missing link — “today [Saturday]! All paving is done … connecting to the Meredith-[Museum of Art] greenway trail. The tunnel under Glen Eden is closed though due to fencing installation…which should be done in a few days. You just have to go around via Ridge Road.”
Tuesday, I had one of the more exhausting times I’ve had in 20 years of covering outdoor adventure — and I was in an air-conditioned building. At a catered affair.
The affair was a media event sponsored by the North Carolina Division of Tourism, a gathering of tourism promotion types from around the state and the people they hoped would write about them. People such as myself.
Immediately upon walking in the door of the Contemporary Art Museum — CAM for short — in downtown Raleigh I was met by my old buddy, Suzanne Brown. Suzanne and I worked together for years in the Features Department of The News & Observer, Suz overseeing everything entertainment, me doing my outdoors thing. In 2008, we were both part of a massive newsroom exodus. I landed here, Suz at Tourism, a job that suits her as she wasted little time getting my attention.
“Do you know about the Southeast Coast Saltwater Paddle Trail?” she asked.
I didn’t, but I didn’t feel too bad upon learning that the trail is a work in progress, a proposed — though some of it exists — paddle trail running from Virginia south through the Carolinas and Georgia, where it will meet with the existing 1,515-mile Florida Circumnavigational Saltwater Paddling Trail. A kind of Appalachian Trail for paddlers.
“Cool!” I said.
“What about Jetpacks?” she wanted to know.
“And what about telephones with TV screens and flying cars?” I said.
No, she said, you can now rent a JetPak on the Outer Banks.
Then, in a Graduatesque nod to the Next Big Thing, she leaned in and whispered “Zip Lines.”