Blazing hot spring

It's been a busy couple of weeks (not even counting yesterday's excitement of bringing home a new vehicle). Three weekends ago was the Adaptive Paddling clinic in Wintergreen, VA to add that endorsement to my Instructor's certification. Two weekends ago I taught a 3-hour course on Falls Lake that was so hot I postponed a class scheduled for the following Sunday. Took a quick day-trip mid-week to Hammock's Beach to check out a kayaking venue there.

Last weekend saw Nancy and me teaching our first (together) whitewater kayaking course on the Cape Fear, followed the next day by a 6-hour course on Lake Jordan (in more temperate weather). Starting to get a lot of calls for roll clinics so I added some info on that on the website today and almost immediately booked a roll session.

We'll probably head to VA this weekend to help out with an adaptive paddling river run and it'll be a good chance to test out the new Subie's chops with a couple of boats on top.

Hope it doesn't get too much hotter and certainly NO drier as summer's first day rolls around tomorrow. We'll have Week-of-Rivers starting at the end of next week and then the paddling REALLY begins.

Big Day

I've been talking about it, researching it, and working on it for a long time, but today is the big day. I finally took possession of a 2009 Subaru Forester after a long wait and a lot of looking around for one. It was overall bad timing on my part: wanting to get the newest of the new model year for this major rebuild of the Forester model and at the same time catching the purchase right at the (hopefully) peak of the latest gas-price escalations to $4 a gallon.



I had to do something to to supplement my auto choices. I simply haven't felt like I could take off by myself in my pickup to the mountains to paddle when it was taking $200 in gas up there and back. Don't get me wrong...the Tundra is still parked outside ready to go when we need to haul a load or have a good carpool of 4 or more.

It was a fairly painful process even though I used the ACA benefit of their VIP Partners program to get dealer invoice minus 2% pricing. That's a long story I might carp about in another post sometime, but I do want to give a lot of credit to Strider Subaru in Asheboro, NC for giving me what I believe to be a good bargain and up-front and friendly service. Thanks to Ricky McNeill there for helping me with this purchase, which finally entailed ordering the car from the factory to get exactly what I wanted. I got a LOT worse treatment and supposed bargains elsewhere in the shopping process and Strider and Ricky shone bright in that field.

The mileage computer was saying 29.7 MPG average for the trip from Asheboro home, so the drive was instant gratification. I'm looking forward to taking advantage of that this weekend and if the planets align properly, I might head to Virginia to help out with an adaptive paddling trip on the James with the Wintergreen folks.

I have some more activities of late to document, but I might just hold off another day and break up the posts.

Mañana.

Adaptive Paddling

I spent a four-day weekend in Virginia last weekend attending and completing an ACA Adaptive Paddling instruction clinic for an ACA endorsement to my teaching credentials. It was a demanding course and taught me a lot about working with people with disabilities. It was very rewarding to be able to assist and work with these folks in developing outfitting and procedures that allow them to participate in kayaking. We had several CCC members or instructors in the clinic as well as instructors from around the country at this event, hosted by the neonatal Wintergreen Adaptive Paddling program.

Among all the other reasons I'm anxiously awaiting delivery of my recently-ordered Subaru Forester, getting back to Virginia and working with the Wintergreen program is certainly high in the list.