Vacation From The Blog

How else to explain not touching the blog in over three weeks? One week of vacation, one killer week on tour in LA, and one week nonstop in the office making up for all the time away.

Obviously, the vacation week was the most fun. Hard to beat a week at the Chappy Shack. It rained almost every day in Boston but we were fortunate and had mostly sunny days on Chappaquiddick. Except for Wednesday. It rained like crazy. We ventured over to Edgartown just to get out of the house and perhaps grab lunch but after the solitude of Chappy, it was difficult to adjust to crowds of tourists there. We lasted 45 min and ran back to the ferry.

Typical day: breakfast outside on the deck, grab the 'cross bikes for a 3-4 hour ride, back to The Shack to swap bikes for beach chairs and books and head to the beach. Then it was usually time to uncork another bottle of wine and grill some fresh fish from the market.

The Vineyard isn't all that big - I think perhaps 25 miles point to point at it's longest. We still managed to ride 200 miles or so during the week. Early in our stay, I stopped in at Edgartown Bikes (dudes there are surly - and not in a good way (i.e. Surly Bikes). I guess they get tired of dealing with tourists but damn, I'll avoid going in there again.) Anyway, stopped there to get a bike map and while pouring over the map noticed a little note about a bike ferry that crossed a little spit of water at Menemsha Harbor. Having never been on a bike ferry, it instantly won a place on the Must Do List. And that ended up being our best ride: out to Menemsha, Chilmark and Acquinnah. Only bad thing was having S cough up a lung as we rode up every hill. We found out later she rode that entire week with pneumonia. Crazy girl!

And some of those hills were big. Either that or the DPW can't do math. ;-)

At one point during one of our longer rides out to the Acquinnah lighthouse, I felt the velcro strap from my seatbag rubbing on the inner thigh. Annoying but not enough for me to stop. Once we reached the lighthouse and were taking pics, I looked down at my shorts and found a quarter size hole. Ummm...I'm thinking I seriously better consider a diet. ;-)

I'm not sure what it is about the beaches on Chappy but it's won my heart over places like Maui, Lizard Island, the Mediterranean, California, the Pacific Northwest (no surprise there) and the Caribbean. Guess I'm really a true east coast girl.

More vacation pics here.