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Another Thanksgiving in New Orleans

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We left Wednesday evening just after work to drive to New Orleans – to Metairie, actually, which is a sort of suburb.  We arrived, as usual, at about two in the morning. After the misery of LAST Thanksgiving with Bryan’s family – click here to go back to that story, because I don’t want to think about it any more – we expected to great time no matter what happened.  And we did enjoy our visit, as we always do. Thanksgiving dinner with our family is a treat every year.

We brought Hayduke, which is extra trouble but works out all right.  He’s a good traveler, and we never have any problems with him in the car on long trips.  We stay at Aunt Dot’s house, and he spends several hours each day visiting with cousin-dog Bourbon at Kevin and Julie’s down the street.  I had arranged for us to have a temporary ‘visitor’ pass for City Bark, the nice dog area at New Orleans’ historic City Park, and we took Hayduke (and sometimes Bourbon) to the park to run and play every day we were there.  Then, he stayed in our bedroom in the evenings and all night. Continue reading “Another Thanksgiving in New Orleans”

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The Leonids

Bryan and I decided that, since the Orionids meteor shower last month had been such a disappointment, we’d try to watch the Leonids this month.  Mandy’s schedule precluded a camping trip, but he and I got up at three in the morning to drive out to the overlook on Highway 5.

We overshot and ended up in Crows instead.  When we turned around to look for the overlook again, we found that it had been removed. (Do they ever do that?  Apparently.)  The other close-by spots had too much light.  We ended up lying on the concrete in front of Salem Fire Station Number 4.  We’d forgotten pillows.  There was way more traffic on the road than we’d expected, and I kept thinking someone would pull into the fire station and hit me, lying there on the driveway in my sleeping bag.

But the meteors were beautiful, as they always are, big streaks of fire across the sky that light up the air they pass through and make it glow.  I love meteor showers.  Sometimes we forget, I think, that we’re just tiny people in a big, big universe.  When we watch for meteors, we come to understand again that we’re just crashing through space along with all the other rocks.  It’s humbling and amazing at the same time.

Also: cold.  I don’t think I woke up fully until sometime during my second cup of coffee, halfway through breakfast at Waffle House.

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The OHT Project: Section 3

One of our favorite long-term projects is the goal of  hiking the whole Ozark Highlands Trail with our friends Britt and Debbie.  We figure that if we do one section each spring and one section each autumn, we’ll be finished by the time Mandy graduates from high school.  We missed last spring, so we’re one chunk behind, but we’ll try to make it up soon.  This fall, we hiked Section 3, from Cherry Bend (on the Pig Trail) over Hare Mountain through Indian Creek, to Lick Branch.

2012 11 08 OHT Section 3 Map

It had been a busy week, so we decided to stay home on Friday night and just leave bright and early Saturday morning for the trail.  We picked up the apparently obligatory giant sandwiches at the Turner Bend store before dropping Mandy, Debbie, Hayduke and I off at the trailhead so that Bryan and Britt could run shuttle.  We picked up trash and cut up old yucky orange vests to pin to our packs.  (It’s the first week of gun season here in Arkansas, a fact that we somehow overlooked when choosing this particular weekend to hike.)

Continue reading “The OHT Project: Section 3”

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Smoke and Suds Cyclocross

2012 11 03 Cyclocross Race Poster

Mandy wanted to go to Fayetteville this past weekend to ride in a couple of cyclocross races.  Bryan already had something planned for the weekend, but our friends Joe and Lisa from Arkansas Outside offered to take her – their family was planning to camp, and they promised to put her to work helping with cooking and dog-minding duties.  She was eager to go, and we couldn’t think of a good reason not to send her. Continue reading “Smoke and Suds Cyclocross”

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Still Water

We spent the summer learning about whitewater kayaking, but the drought in Arkansas has continued into the autumn and we’ve branched out a bit into doing things in calmer water. In the very first chapter of The Wind In The Willows, Water Rat told Mole “believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING–absolute nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” We’re finding that we really like messing around in boats, too, whether in challenging whitewater or quieter streams.

In September, part of the Caddo River was high enough to float, so we joined a group of friends to do a little section of that waterway. The river was calm and easy, but we were ill-prepared for the trip because we’d assumed that the group would float the short section straight through. While they ate fried chicken and big thick sandwiches for lunch, we played in the water. Next time we’ll understand that they mean to spend the whole day paddling, and we’ll pack a big complicated lunch as well! Continue reading “Still Water”

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Sylamore Trail

After a disappointingly short and rainy backpack trip on Buckeye Mountain, our young friend Monkey was eager to try another, more pleasant backpacking trip.  We wiggled our schedule around a bit and worked in a weekend trip to the Sylamore Trail, one of my most favorite autumn hikes in Arkansas.

The stretch of the Sylamore between Barkshed and Gunner Pool is about five miles of really neat hiking.  For the most part, the trail runs along the bluff well above the creek.  In the spring and fall it’s a nice hike, but when the leaves are down there are some really great views through the bare trees down to the pools and ripples of Sylamore Creek.  Some of the trail runs under overhanging limestone bluffs and through big weathered breakdown chunks. Continue reading “Sylamore Trail”

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‘Cross Dresser

Cyclocross is a kind of bicycle racing popular in Europe and in the more interesting parts of the US. Arkansas cyclocross is  just getting started – last year’s fall/winter series was sort of ragtag, I’ve heard, but there’s more momentum and organization behind this year’s races. Racers do several laps around a closed course, on a mix of surfaces – usually some pavement, some gravel, and some grass or dirt or mud. There are obstacles to ride or jump over, like tree limbs and boards, ditches, and sometimes even stairs to run down while carrying a bike. The course is taped off in such a way that there are often sharp turns to navigate as well. Racers ride as hard as they can to do as many laps as possible in a certain period of time – 40 or 50 minutes seems to be the usual length of a cyclocross race.

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Mandy was a little bit interested in cyclocross last year, but we never actually got around to watching a race. This summer, when her bike was wrecked, the replacement we bought was a cyclocross bike. We thought it was a good choice because it was set up more or less as a road bike, but the frame and fork were broad enough to accommodate wider tires when we wanted to ride on gravel roads or smooth trails. Having a cyclocross bike, though, made her think that maybe she wanted to race cyclocross this season. Continue reading “‘Cross Dresser”

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Oxygen, My Friend

For years and years, I’ve had weird ‘groups’ of what I thought were migraine headaches.  I thought that all horrible headaches were migraines.

But these were strange.  For one thing, they happened in groups – I’d be fine for a year or two, and then I’d be hit with an awful headache every other day for a month and a half.  And then they’d be gone, just like that.  They didn’t really act like regular migraines – I never had auras and didn’t feel nauseated and didn’t throw up.  I wasn’t particularly sensitive to light or sound.  I didn’t respond very well to migraine medicine.  And while I understood that migraines hurt a lot, these headaches seemed worse.  People would say “oh, I have a terrible migraine” but they’d often still be able to drive, or talk – when I had one, I couldn’t do anything but pace and bang my head on the wall.  And when the headache was finally over, hours later, I’d need to sleep for a couple of hours before being able to function again.  Even then, I’d be exhausted and sore for at least another day, just from my body’s reaction to the pain. Continue reading “Oxygen, My Friend”

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Water Dawg

Hayduke loves water, so when when we decided to buy boats early this year, it seemed unkind to consider getting into a hobby he’d love, in a way that excluded him.  So I chose my boat with the intention of paddling with Hayduke.  We brought him with us to the lake when we tested boats.  I only looked at buying boats that his wet doggy body would fit in, and that he could get in and out of while out on the water.  We practiced.  I chose the Native because it seemed to work well for this, and once home, I put the boat in the living room floor and taught him to get in and out of it, and encouraged him to lie down inside.

A fat lot of good THAT did – the dog more or less totally refuses to get into the boat on the water.  I’ve tried and tried to teach him to ride with me.  I’ve put soft things in the bottom so that it would be less slippery.  I’ve tried using a tab on his pinch collar to hold him.  I’ve tried bribing him with snacks. I’ve given up. Continue reading “Water Dawg”