I needed a break yesterday, and so instead of my customary bicycle ride took my canoe to the Potomac River. My launching point was the mouth of the Monocacy River, which flows into the Potomac. I canoed out under the old Monocacy Aqueduct, which once carried the C&O canal over the Monocacy River. I turned upstream into the Potomac and paddled around the first island and returned on the side closest to the Virginia shore.
As you can see from several photos the water was low – I even had to get out and drag my canoe at one point, but as always the paddle was rejuvenating. It’s sometimes dicey to have a camera with me in the canoe (I lost a Nikon F3 and three good prime lenses kayaking in Hanalei Bay once upon a time, but that’s another story). The water here is pretty calm so I took the chance and was glad to get these memories of the day.
I pulled in below the Tarara winery (near Leesburg, VA) to take a shot of their logo on an old concrete culvert. It always has fascinated me, as “Tarara” backward spells “Ararat”, the mountain Noah’s ark landed on. (And it’s a real mountain in northeastern Turkey that I have climbed, but that too is another story).
On my ride home I took several pictures of the sky, which was simply magnificent. Just before sunset the image of a golden angel appeared flying in the clouds, which (with some imagination) you can see in the last photo.
