Oh, and by the way...

You see the darndest things in Central Park.

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Arboreal Cycling for Dummies

This is the haunted face of a man who has gone out for a pleasant Saturday morning ride with his wife along the Capital Crescent, as bucolic and meandering a swathe of ex-railway line as you could hope to find in the heart of the Capital of the Free World, and finds himself climbing and twisting and carting and gasping his way through the splintered branches of his tenth upended tree. This would have been last weekend – the morning after the super-derecho which laid waste to the trees along the trail, as well as the grid, and left us all without power for up to seven days in the midst of a heatwave, in that poetically interconnected way in which these events have a habit of occurring. On the right morning, though, it can be a truly lovely ride, a fact the gorgeous cyclist in the image below is celebrating in an oddly martial way.

A bit of culture

Last Sunday we drove up to Philadelphia to visit Craig, Elissa and Mars, respectively Gina's cousin, his lovely spouse and their beautiful son. Philly is very different to DC (in the same way that two people known as "Philly" and "DC" would be; "Philly" would be worn, warm and eccentric, whereas "DC" would be a guy in pastel shorts, a navy blue polo and boat shoes. On the weekends, anyway.) We took an amble through Center City with them, and lunched in leafy Rittenhouse Square on vegetarian burgers. A beautifully utilised urban space:

Today we finally made it to the Hirschorn Museum, impelled there by Gina's afternoon off and Mara, a young friend of Bridget's. She is visiting us from Frankfurt and we felt a bit of culture would be in order. She took this one in the Suprasensorial exhibition, which combines re-installations of some trippy pieces from last century with some contemporary stuff. Either there or in that minimalist shoeshop in Georgetown, where $1000 would get you a pair of these stylish booties. The Hirschorn is a beautiful circular gallery, and in the courtyard at the moment, ranged menacingly around the pool, are Ai Weiwei's Chinese Zodiac Heads. Aren't you loving these sophisticated links?

Camelot

That would be the view of the Potomac and Georgetown at sunset from the deck of the Kennedy Centre, a mausoleum to modesty of scale, shortly after a dramatic flyby by a Blackhawk helicopter. We were there last week for the Vital Voices Global Women's Leadership Awards as were Tina Brown, Wolf Blitzer and Chelsea Clinton, alhough in more central roles than we. Than me, anyway. Gina and Siena pretty much kicked off proceedings with this. The women awarded were a truly amazing bunch - a Pakistani filmmaker (whom we later lifted home) who has almost singlehandedly put paid to the practice of retributive arranged marriages, a Samoan lady who has built an entire industry of sustainable palm oil for sale to the body shop, five courageous women from various bits of the Arab world in foment. Afterwards, furious networking over dinner and drinks, with the average encounter a heartfelt and effective 45 secs, then onto the next one.

It's been a while

We have fallen very abruptly out of the habit of updating our blog, and for that we apologise. In mitigation, we have had a heck of a few months, with various visitors (all of them most welcome) and sundry trips,  both professional and leisurely, alone or together. So in order to achieve a clean slate, and bring you up to speed, we offer this collection of illuminating pictures and crisply worded captions, with the intention that the regular service will resume once you've digested these. Enjoy.

That's us at the summit of Sugarloaf, the highest hill close to DC (see smog in background) on a hot Sunday morning at the beginning of summer.

A very trendy roll from Sundevich, down historic Blagden Alley, and an R40 cream soda.

James' first Holy Communion, for which his grandparents Pam and Charles joined us.

They were also with us for an action packed 24 hours in New York. A famous tunnel in Central Park,

an extremely cool icecream on the High Line, an overhead railway track which has been converted into a park,

and a Sunday morning ride on the Staten Island ferry.

Back in DC, a late afternoon ramble

along the Potomac and Ohio Canal

to Great Falls, a sight which never fails to stir the blood.

In the meantime, baseball season was in full swing, and with it, James and the rest of the Cap City Little League Giants.

 

After the game, for the sake of continuity, you might find us at the Broad Branch Market, our neighbourhood store with a great deli and an even better beer section.

 

Bringing us right up to speed, we've just returned from a weekend at Bethany Beach, with an old colleague of Gina's and his family.

 James received a crash course in the correct way to catch Chesapeake Blue crabs...

and how best to enjoy them.

board beyond belief

Right back into it after a long weekend of snowboarding in West Virginia. After lots of homework, we settled on Snowshoe Mountain, which is widely touted as being the biggest and best mountain to be found in the Mid Atlantic region, an area not known for chest deep powder and vast white wildernesses. But a great find. Snowshoe is an “upside down” resort, which means you drive interminably upward through the mountainous backwoods of West Virginia then arrive at your destination with all the slopes below you. “Country Roads” got us there, with Gina and I knowing a surprising number of the lyrics, belting them out to an unimpressed James and a sleeping Siena. The resort, to the unschooled eye, looks large, with various accommodation options, a mallish village area with shops and restaurants and a total of 60 runs, 14 lifts and 1000 vertical feet. We were located in the Expedition Centre in a compact hotel room with mini-kitchen overlooking the action of the beginner's slope. Perfect. Day 1 was a little tricky, with neither James nor I spending enough time on the beginner's slope and thus having a fairly daunting time of it on our first green run – point your board down the mountain and wait for your first bone crunching fall sort of thing. Then we punished ourselves for our arrogance by heading over to Silver Creek – once a standalone resort, now part of Snowshoe – for some icy night riding. Our efforts on day two were more restrained, with more focus being given to braking rather than acceleration, and by day three, Gina and I were both making graceful, sweeping turns some of the time, while James was making it to the bottom even faster. Siena took it in turns being babysat by Gina and I, but this too will pass. By the time we made one last early morning run on day four we were hooked. A highlight of the trip was West Virginia itself. For much of the drive, we drove through the Washington State Forest, dense and endless, hairpin bends with occasional vistas of mountains rolling endlessly west, punctuated with variations on the theme of “rustic habitation” from neat whitewashed clapboard homes with stars and stripes hanging from the porch to rundown trailers with broken stock cars in the yard. And everywhere, the plaintive, nasal stylings of country music. Everywhere. The lift line. The Tastee Freeze where we had burgers on the way there and back. The pizza place. The barbecue place. The snowboard shop. That or classic rock, most incongruously “Highway to Hell” as J and I were waiting in a light line for a highspeed quad to take us to back to the top of the mountain one beautiful, sunny morning.

Mountain Momma

Photo by Gina

New Year’s Day, 2012, and we took a drive out to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park in order to drive the famous Blue Ridge Parkway. It was an unpromising drive out – west from DC along a little bit of Route 66, where nobody was getting any kicks until Siena fell asleep, and then through various small and increasingly agricultural towns to the entrance, as far as I can tell, at Swift Run Gap, which we had reached on the instructions of the Garmin in our rented Nissan. There’s a point with these devices where faith kicks in. Unable to find a suitable address (Number 1, Skyline Drive, Virginia?) we gave it the broadest possible pointers and hoped for the best. It worked out really well: we entered the park quite far to the south, exited right at the top with a shorter drive home than there, and it only really started raining when we were near the end of our walk to Dark Hollow Falls. The setup of the park is odd. Having run a ribbon of tarmacadam all the way along the Blue Ridge, splitting a quite substantial wilderness area down the middle, the Americans (not all of them, obviously, but you know) decided to leave well enough alone. So the facilities thereafter are sketchy. Numerous view sites, a couple of lodges, a restaurant and camping store setup at Big Meadow, and that’s it. None of it, of course, operational at this time of year, except the signs telling us to watch out for bears, although not what to do if we don’t manage to. But what a drive: the Shenandoah valley with its patchwork farmlands and indeed the West to the west, the coastal plain to the east and miles and miles of bare, grey winter forest at various gradients of extremely steep in between. A couple of grey deer looking hopeful, a handful of tourists like ourselves who didn’t get the note about it not being the done thing at this time of year, some patches of sun then the swift arrival of weather in the mountains. We’ll definitely be back, because there are many trails we’d like to walk together, but having enjoyed the place in solitude I’m not sure if we’ll have stomach for the hordes. Driving home was an object lesson in American scale. The scenic route out was sparsely sprinkled with gift shops, wine cellars and farm stalls – any comparable route in SA would be more densely baubled – but the minute you start to get into the cities of the plain, it’s chains and strip malls and big box retailers all the way – huge, featureless, bleak and enervating, just horrible. And nothing in between. But the Virginia countryside, which we caught in some late afternoon light which set the grey woods ablaze, was beautiful.