journey outside dc

It was right after the 1988 Calgary Olympics that I first tried skiing and fell in love with it. So given the great Vancouver Olympics and all the snowfall we’ve received where is the best place near DC to go skiing? A friend of mine went to Whitetail about 1.5 hours from DC (you can get directions here.) She writes:

“The skiing was great, all groomed trails, some icy spots, but then it started to snow!! Not the top, but near the best conditions/snow I’ve skied in this area. Had there been less, or no ice, I would have said this was the best conditions. Got a bit pricier in the past few years tho… $59 for 8 hour pass. We all had our own skis.”

Anyone have any recommendations for the best local skiing options?

The following was written by PoP contributor, Charles

You don’t actually have to be much of a bluegrass fan to really like bluegrass festivals. Half the fun is putting as much psychic distance between yourself and the city as seems possible without a plane ticket or a passport. Pitching a tent on the banks of Shavers Fork and watching bluegrass on a hand-built stage, surrounded by green mountains and the sort of people who find your DC plates exotic enough to start up a conversation does that quite nicely.

But the music is pretty good, too. I am no bluegrass expert, but one of the most memorable musical moment I’ve ever had came a couple of years back at “Li’L Margaret’s Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival” when a heavy-set blind guy named Michael Cleveland threw down against a skinny kid called Patrick McAvinue and they tore the place up with just a couple of fiddles and a stand-up mic.

We didn’t see anything quite that astounding last weekend, at the “Pickin’ in Parsons (West Virginia) Celebration of Bluegrass and Hillbilly Music,” but we caught most of the 15 acts that played over three days and barely heard a bad note. Every now and then one of the better known acts, like Rhonda Vincent & The Rage or Randy Waller and the (next generation of, apparently) Country Gentlemen seemed a little slick. But the music was fun and heartfelt and occasionally brilliant, in a setting that’s the mountaineer equivalent of the smoky bar where you caught Nirvana just before Nevermind came out.

It’s mostly the music, but it’s not just the music. Apparently there’s redneck Borscht Belt, also in the mountains but several hundred miles south of the Catskills, and the one-liners are unrelenting. Karl Shiflett in particular seems to be trapped in an old Hee Haw rerun (“My fiddler got on the airplane and set down next to a preacher….”), and what’s up with the weird faces and that thing he does with his leg? But his playing makes up for his corn. And outfits like the Hillbilly Gypsies and the Tennessee Mafia Jug Band are clearly out to have as much fun as you are, and if that means a few groaners in between truly impressive picking (and, with the Gypsies, the hottest hillbilly girl in America singing murder ballads), well, it’s just a way of reminding you that all this talk about culture and tradition is nice, but we’re here to have a good time. Continues after the jump. (more…)

photo by Robert Lz.

As a kid I loved Ocean City, MD. I remember scarfing down buckets of Fisher’s popcorn, Dumsers ice cream, chocolate strawberries from Candy Kitchen (what can I say, I was a hungry kid), then immediately racing off into the waves only to return 5 minutes later with a massive stomachache, and a craving for more popcorn. We’d run around all day and stop by the Gocart track on the way home to race off any excess energy before the long, slow trek home bumper to bumper with the other day-trippers who were too stingy to stay in a beachside hotel.

Yet I can’t stand the place now. Not to offend OC fans, I think the beach is a poor option for DCers to trek to when in need of sun. I went a little while ago to reminisce over my younger days face-first in a bucket of Fishers, and instead got a different taste of Ocean City – that tasted a little like brine. The boardwalk, which when I was a kid seemed like the yellow brick road, is now overrun by obese children. The beach is sardine-like crowded and filled with discarded Big Gulp cups and taffy wrappers, and just when you think you found an OK spot to squeeze into, you realize your neighbors are apparently into blasting Garth Brooks and not having a full set of teeth and screaming things like ‘WADE GIT YOR CIGARUT BUTTS AWF MAH TOWEL OR AH WEAL STICK THIS HERE UMBRELLU STRAIGHT UP UR…’

Also the attendants of the Ocean City rides really need to ease up on the Drakkar Noir.

Maybe there are hidden gems of the city that I haven’t experienced? But for now I’d pick Rehoboth, Assateague, hell even Dewey, over OC. What am I missing out on?

When I tell people I

photo by John Kercher

Robyn last wrote about Virginia’s Vineyards

Hike Old Rag Mountain

You know when you’re handed a finish-by-5pm-or-die project at work, and when you’re handed it you’re getting eyed by the overenthusiastic entry level 22 year old who wants your job, and you know if you don’t finish it the fate of the company will be in question and your nemesis may win? So you work your butt off and race to plop project down on boss’s desk and they say ‘good job, would you like a tissue for your forehead,’ and you did it.

Hiking Old Rag is a little like that.

Old Rag Mountain hike is one of Shenandoah National Park’s most popular hikes, because it combines rock scrambling, climbing through cracks, and nine view points. Hiking it takes over 5 hours, a lot of hand eye coordination, and hiking boots – which as an amateur, lackadaisical athlete I did not bring and instead wore my Sauconys from high school. Despite falling every couple of steps, I saw some very pretty scenery that made DC feel more than just a couple hours away. Now I’m not the type that gets emotional about nature, but when you I got to the summit and saw incredible views across Virginia, the Sound of Music soundtrack played in my head for a second. And then I realized I had to go down steep rocks in my Saucony sneakers, and the tune changed to something much more brooding.

What’s your favorite hike in Shenandoah?

Bladensburg feels as though it’s full of pawnshops, laundromats, and ghosts. A pre-industrial victim of environmental change, what was once one of the busiest ports on the East Coast has been scraped away, replaced by warehouses and light industry – metal fencing, transmission shops, the kind of businesses where guys show up at 7AM and have a smoke in the parking lot, before they go in to stock plumbing supplies or pull a tranny (a phrase that has a very different meaning for me than it had when I lived on 11th and Mass).

But the ghosts are there. Patsy Cline on a mural. The sailors and marines that fell under the command of Commodore Barney (think Barney Circle), who’d burned his fleet and – with a largely African American force – tried to keep the British out of Washington, after the first line of militia had fled in the face of hardened veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The ones who couldn’t walk away from the famed dueling grounds, like Stephen Decatur and Francis Scott Key’s son, Daniel, and the almost 50 others who fell there. And the World War One veterans honored by a cross whose grace is only amplified by the grey traffic circle and grim buildings it’s set against. Courage, indeed.

The Fort Lincoln Cemetery claims to have the most impressive publicly-owned mausoleum in the world, and it is indeed impressive, looming just above the remnants of the Civil War fort and hillside where Barney’s men fought the Brits. And, at the edge of the cemetery: the dueling grounds. Walking through the grounds at dawn, in the mist and the dew and the flowers, you can almost get a feel for the top hats and greatcoats and seconds and pistols, brilliant mornings ending badly. The traffic of Bladensburg Road disappears and you begin to wonder what it was like, rubbing that flintlock, nervously checking your shot and powder, glancing across the lawn to try and divine who’d still be alive come noon. It’s sandwiched in between a subdivision and the graveyard, and looks and feels exactly like a dueling ground should. Continues after the jump. (more…)