What’s better than probing a cemetery on a hot summer night? Hiking the base of Pilot Mountain, perhaps? Or maybe a triathlon of the sprint variety. You’ve got options this weekend.
Coast / Coastal Plain
It’s every kid’s perfect summer night: wait until sunset, then grab a flashlight and wander through the local cemetery. A rite of youth fraught with the forbidden: sneaking out after dark, trespassing, cavorting among the dead … . No wonder it was a highlight of being a kid.
The heat, as Glenn Frey once declared, is on. Temperatures this weekend could hit triple digits, meaning one of two things for the outdoor inclined: play on the water or play during the cool of the night.
Coast
Forecast high Sunday for Spring Lake in the coastal plain: 101. Lordy!
A mellow organized ride in Wilmington shuns the hammerhead drama of most such events; if you’re late for Sunday’s hike at Pilot Mountain, no problem — another will come along; and if there was ever a good reason to run a 5K, what could be better than a falafel-bearing t-shirt?
When I first started writing about fitness and the outdoors back in the early 1990s, there were a handful of ways you could welcome the New Year in most communities. There was usually a 5K run, a bike shop sponsored a casual ride, canoe clubs held members-only paddles, there was a hike or two, and some oddball group was jumping into a local lake (and jumping right back out again). You had options for welcoming the new year, but not a lot.
Stuffed inside the chimney with no apparent place to go my thoughts flashed back 17 years. It was a similar situation, only that time I was clinging to the side of a 600-foot granite dome thinking a thought I’d never had in the outdoors: I’d rather be in an office. An air conditioned office, behind a desk, both feet flatly planted on cheap, stained carpet. Maybe even with an impossible deadline looming.