FloydFest X!

It's taken me a week to get around to writing this, but it's been a busy week.

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I headed down to Southwest Virginia for FloydFest, an outdoor, multi-venue music festival now in it's 10th year. If you don't know (and I didn't until a couple of years ago) SW VA has long been a hotbed of fine bluegrass music. FloydFest had a huge array of musicians over 4 days, but we only made it down for 2 days. Still, a wonderful time.

I can't possibly touch on everything we did and saw, but here are a few highlights -

Taj Mahal on Saturday evening was a truly fun way to end the day. His energy and presence on stage, the way he works a crowd, all of it... just incredible. A consummate performer, and a very talented musician. And the crowd just loved it.

The Tony Rice Unit was amazing! Truly gifted musicians playing Tony's signature mix of bluegrass and jazz on guitars, bass, fiddle, and mandolin. Tony's guitar playing was delightful to watch... he's one of those guys who makes great playing look easy, and he seems to be enjoying himself so much as he plays. 

At the end of that set, David Grisman came out on stage and joined in on mandolin. Very cool, and a nice lead in to the next set, which was the David Grisman Sextet.  Aside from the truly great musicianship and Grisman's stage presence (he is a character, I have to say), this set was fascinating because the weather took  a major part. The day was full of changes, and the Grisman set saw sunshine, rain, and a truly mystical, beautiful fog that rolled in at one point. 

The last act we saw was the last act of the whole event... the Del McCoury Band.  I'll confess, coming late to the world of bluegrass, I really didn't know anything about them, but I am so glad I got to see Del and his sons and band live.  Wow! Some truly amazing playing and singing. Much more "old school" than some of the other acts, and a lot of fun to watch on stage. And at one point, Del's GRAND son came out on stage to join in on guitar. I have to imagine it's wonderful to share the music you love across three generations of family.

Late in the Del McCoury set, Peter Rowan (who we had seen earlier in the day and is also a great act) and David Grisman came out and joined in, making for a really lively, fun, brilliant finale to a terrific four day event.

Part of me wishes I'd been there for the whole thing, to get the "full experience"... but honestly, I'm not sure it wouldn't have left me feeling overwhelmed. Guess I'd have to try it to know for sure.

One thing that worked out brilliantly for us was bringing our Brompton folding bikes. The event had remote parking lots and shuttle buses to the venue, but we zoomed back and forth, over the rolling hills of SW VA on our Bromptons, while others stood in line for the buses. Great fun, and very convenient. Oh, and the bike rack on the back of the car? Just there because we didn't bother to take it off. The Bromptons folded up and tucked into the back with the rest of our luggage.

Oh, and speaking of lines... we had earlier discussed possibly camping on site, as that's an option offered at FloydFest. Upon seeing the actual grounds though... and the VERY long line for showers (you know it's bad when they install benches), we were just as happy we'd found a great hotel with a last minute cancellation. A lovely, big room with jacuzzi and porch, and on our last day there, one of the other guests was playing banjo softly on the deck as we packed up.  Very nice!

More photos and a few videos can be seen at:  FloydFest X

A Trip to Chincoteague

Driftwood shell art on the beach.
People add pieces to it every day.

Well, it's taken me far too long to sit down and write this out, but I wanted to share the trip to Chincoteague, VA that my girlfriend and I took the weekend of June 11th - 13th. For those of you who don't know, Chincoteague is a tiny island off the tip of Virginia's part of the Eastern Shore. It was made famous in a series of children's books, the most famous of which is Misty of Chincoteague, which tells a tale based around the wild ponies of neighboring Assateague Island. The ponies on the island are in two distinct herds, and the Virginia herd is owned and managed by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Dept, which rounds up ponies every year and auctions off some of them.

Anyway, Christy and I had talked about visiting there for quite a while, since we'd both been avid readers of the books, and had both been there some years ago, but hadn't visited in a long time. So I managed to make a deal with Bruce, my trusted lieutenant at the shop, and we took three days off together to camp down there. And despite less than meticulous planning on my part, we had a wonderful time!

View of marsh and lighthouse from our site

To begin with, we ended up with a really great campsite, at the Maddox Family Campground, on Chincoteague. Remarkably convenient to both the beach (which is part of the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge) and downtown Chincoteague, it has a large open area for tents at the edges of the campground. We pitched our tent far from any neighboring tents and had a lovely view of the marsh and lighthouse... and enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes and biting flies away! I couldn't have hoped for a better site for our first camping trip together.

This fellow acted tough as long as I kept my distance

Assateague has beautiful sandy beaches, and if you're willing to walk a ways, you can have a stretch of it just about to yourself. We took several long walks where most of the living creatures we saw were birds, crabs, and dolphins.  One particularly lucky sighting was a bald eagle, zooming very low over the waves. I've seen a number of baldies along bays and rivers and streams, but never one right over the ocean. Of course we saw plenty of gulls, but they were mostly Laughing Gulls, not the more familiar Herring Gull. We also saw several flights of Pelicans and watched their wild display of diving for fish, smashing into the water with a great splash.  I've also never seen anywhere near as many Osprey in one day as we saw on our walks... truly astonishing.

Click to enlarge -
If you look really closely, to the
right of the birds, you can just
make out dolphin fins!

Perhaps the best animal sighting wasn't really a "sighting" strictly speaking. We saw several schools of dolphins during our walks, which we both really got excited about. The coolest part was when Christy suddenly realized she was hearing the dolphins... she was floating on her back, with her head tipped back, and heard a steady, loud clicking sound. I checked it out too, and sure enough, there it was. Neither one of us had ever heard them in the wild before, so it was a very fun discovery.

See him? By the middle
clump of brown needles.

The Refuge also has some trails running through it, a few of which are "multi-use", so we unfolded our Brompton folding bikes and tootled around the marshes and woods for a while, stopping to watch a bald eagle perching in a tree. It was pretty far away, and hard to spot, but as is so often the case, once you find it, you can't imagine how you didn't see it in the first place.

Of course, no visit to Chincoteague and Assateague would be complete without ponies. We actually only saw a few small bands out in the wild (I think the Maryland end might be better for wild pony sightings), but we also visited the Chincoteague Pony Center in town. There we visited the gift shop, but mostly just stood and watched and petted the ponies. Some things you never grow out of... it's fun to see people of all ages just stand and smile and touch these beautiful animals.

My Laughing Gull kite and Scott Sled

Another first for us on this trip was kiteflying... well, the first time we've ever done it together. Long ago, in my teens, I helped start up a kite making company with my then-brother-in-law, and I've owned and flown a variety of kites on and off over the years ever since. The beach is always a fun place for kites, so I brought some along, and one evening after our walk we put a few up in the air and just relaxed and enjoyed the feel of a tug on the string and the dancing of kites in the air. One of the several kites we flew was of my own design, built over 30 years ago (wow), in the image of a Laughing Gull. It had been one of our popular models back when the business was going strong, and it still flies great, if I may say so myself. My girlfriend flew a classic delta, as well as the yellow Scott Sled you see to the left, both also more than 30 years old.

It wasn't all sand and sun and water and wilds for us though... the town of Chincoteague is very charming, and has a bunch of shops and restaurants and a museum to visit. We didn't get to everything (so darn, we'll have to go back!), but we got a nice taste of the town by wandering the main street and ducking into some shops. Among the sights we took in were the Volunteer Fire Deptarment's firehouse on Main Street, the Roxy Theatre (where Misty put her hoofprints), and a lovely little memorial/statue of Misty, based on one of Wesley Dennis' wonderful illustrations from the book.  And of course we indulged ourselves with some ice cream... is it possible to go to the beach and not do so? I think not.

All in all a wonderful, fun, relaxing trip. Too short, of course, but most vacations are. This way we've always got more to see and do and all the more reason to go back.

Assateague Lighthouse

More photos -

Chincoteague/Assateague June 11-14, 2011

Zion National Park

Woo hoo! What a great, fantastic, amazing place!

I was in Las Vegas for a Interbike, the big bicycle trade show in the US, and had managed to get a little extra time off, so I could rent a car and drive on up to Zion National Park in Utah. Why didn't I stay in Vegas, one of the major vacation destinations in the country? Well, I'll write a more detailed post with my thoughts on that city, but for now, let's just say it's one of my least favorite places to be. I'm just not a Vegas kinda guy.

So off I went last Friday to Zion. The drive was fun, and I marvelled at how the landscape changed from Nevada to Arizona (you pass through a tiny corner of AZ) to Utah. Particularly the transition from Nevada to Arizona... you can almost see the border in the land. No offense to Nevadans, but I really find the AZ/UT scenery prettier.

I arrived At Zion about noon, which gave me just enough time to get a taste for the park. Enough of a taste to say I really want to come back some time when I have a week or so to spend. I had been to the park once before, but it was dark by the time I got there, and I never really saw much of anything. This time, I climbed on the shuttle bus (cars are not allowed on the main road in season) and looked at the park literature, trying to figure out which trail to explore, since I wanted to do some hiking. I stopped at the Zion Lodge for lunch, and considered the popular Emerald Pools trails... but their very popularity made me shy away. A friend had suggested the Angel's Landing Trail, if I felt up to it. Looking at the park materials, it sounded challenging, but also really cool. So I decided to try it out, figuring I could always turn around if it proved too much for that day.

If you look at the picture at the top, you'll see a high peak there in the middle of the picture. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's where I was headed... right to the top of that! It's about a 2.5 mile hike up there, with a lot of altitude gain, as you might guess. And there are parts of it where they've installed chains on the trickier bits so you have something to grab onto when you're faced with a sheer dropoff of over 800 feet! It's actually not as scary as it sounds... or at least I didn't think so, but I have zero fear of heights, so your experience may be very different. I have to imagine that fear of heights would really change one's perception of this hike. For me, it was fun, challenging and spectacularly beautiful.

I did reach one spot where I thought about turning back and not completing the whole hike. There's a lovely spot about a half mile from the top where you can sit and admire the views... and watch folks navigating the last strenuous and tricky bit! There's a couple of signs up there at that point....
The "oh crap" stick figure sign didn't really deter me. The smaller brown sign however did specifically mention the hazard of lightning... and I had heard thunder on the way up. It was pretty clear by the time got to these signs, but I overheard a few folks on the way down talking about near lightning strikes at the top. Heights, as I said, don't bother me... getting hit by big bolts of electricity is another matter. So I sat a few minutes, watching others scramble up or down the last half mile, and enjoying the view where I was, and pondered. Here's a shot of one of the steep bits to the right there, complete with chains.







Anyway, after a few minutes of thought and just soaking in a beautiful day, I thought "when the heck am I going to be here again?" That cinched it for me, and I headed up to the top. Sure, it was challenging, but not unreasonably so. And the view from the top was just amazing. Along the way, I encountered a bunch of chipmunks and lizards, more than I would have expected that high up.

One of the first things I encountered in the last stretch was a ridge about 30 inches wide, with a chain down the middle as a handhold, with sheer dropoffs to either side to rock at least 800 feet below. Wow! That's the spot where I think a person afraid of heights might just "freeze" and not be able to make it. For me it was fun. You can see what it looks like from above to the left here.




The next part was basically a scramble up steep rock faces with and without chains for help. At the top you find a large, flat rock surface, with a wide open view all around. Amazing, beautiful, incredible place! And well worth the effort to get there.

The hike down was less eventful, but lovely. I took the opportunity to look at some of the plant life, and stopped at one point to listen to the singing of tree frogs, a sound you don't expect to hear in a desert climate.


Finally, just as I was reaching the canyon floor, I came upon a gentleman with his friends, who proceeded to introduce me to Farnsworth, the tarantula he'd found and picked up on the trail. Now, in general I like spiders, and I know that US tarantula bites are typically not serious, but I don't think I'd be so bold as to scoop one up and let it crawl on me for a while. But that's just me. Here's a shot of Farnworth, just for grins:










All in all, an amazing hike, and a beautiful day. I'm so glad I decided to try that trail and push on to the top. You can see how glad I am by the goofy grin on my face here in a picture I took at the top, with the Great White Throne behind me:More pictures at:

http://flickr.com/photos/43828356@N00/sets/72157607609912383/