The lake was exceptionally naughty…

Once again, I found myself with some time to give the nearby lake a good paddling. It’s said that in order to get real physical development you have to work out to exhaustion…so I did. Five hours of giving the lake a paddling, and over 15 miles of travel in the process. My goal is to get to the point where I can set out and get comfortably to and from anywhere on the lake that I might want to go during a single paddling session, at least if I leave early enough.

The Minister of the Front End of the Kayak is out of town, so I struck out bravely all alone in my explorations. It’s just as well – the Minister of the Front End doesn’t like going to the civilized side of the lake. She’d much rather head into areas of the northern side of the lake to poke around the tree-lined inlets. I, on the other hand, find the populated side of the lake much more interesting. It’s not that I dislike the more wilderness-themed areas, but to me one “beautiful expanse of tree-lined lake shore” (alligators and random fishing boats aside) looks pretty much like any other. There are all kinds of odd things to find hidden in the populated side of the lake, however. I’m mentally kicking myself for forgetting to get a picture of the “Southern Empres”[sic – looked like they’d lost a letter] Paddlewheel boat as I paddled by. Not all of the interesting things are even human-derived – the bird-covered island was kind of a surprise.

Interactive map with track and pictures (which will hopefully display correctly now) may be found below (RSS feed readers, you may need to click through to the actual blog post to see it; or, download the .kml file of this weekend’s Lake Conroe paddling trip [width=540;height=540] and take a look at it in Google Earth…)

I’m going to have to paddle back out to “Zach’s Bar-B-Q Barge” for lunch one of these days and see how they are. Checking out the publically-accessible and potentially paddle-friendly establishments on the lake is one of my excuses for getting out into the Big Room for exercise.

Full-scale and fully geolocated versions of several photos from this trip may be found at the Panoramio page. I’m also still thinking about getting a recorder and incorporating some audio into these things. Hopefully Firefox 3.5 will actually be released one of these days…

Now, back to bed. I have to get up to start the work-week in about 8 hours…Good night everyone, and let me know how the map works and how the pictures look…

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Epicanis

The Author is (currently) an autodidactic student of Industrial and Environmental microbiology, who is sick of people assuming all microbiology should be medical in nature, and who would really like to be allowed to go to graduate school one of these days now that he's finished his BS in Microbiology (with a bonus AS in Chemistry). He also enjoys exploring the Big Room (the one with the really high blue ceiling and big light that tracks from one side to the other every day) and looking at its contents from unusual mental angles.

8 thoughts on “The lake was exceptionally naughty…”

  1. Despite the diploiditude of its contents, the name still seemed appropriate. Come to think of it, I would have sworn one of the books I’m trying to forcefeed myself before I have to return them to the library suggested that some yeasts may produce diploid spores under some conditions, so maybe the name fits even better than I’d anticipated.

    After running into the floating “Zach’s Bar-B-Q Barge” place on that paddling trip, I’m now wondering what it would take to run a floating brewery…

  2. I just downloaded the new safari yesterday, but I have no idea if it supports HTML 5. I was using firefox for a while, but I switched back…obviously.

  3. Ah, okay – I hate Apple’s multiple-version-numbers-for-everything schtick. (Is it “Safari 4” or is it “Safari 530.17”? Is it Mac OSX version “10.5” or is it version “8.11” as `uname -r` reports?)

    I can confirm that if you install XiphQT, Safari 4 seems to handle the same audio and video codecs that Firefox 3.5 (and Opera and eventually Chrome and Konqueror – basically everyone but Microsoft Internet Exploiter) does.

  4. Map works for me, and the pics are cool. I’m tempted to get a GPS so I can geolocate when my wife and I travel for our anniversary to the Outer Banks of NC.

  5. For me, geolocation is a huge amount of fun, but also useful. Having the locations and times of my paths and photographs (and, coming soon, other media) adds useful context I think, and looking at them overlaid on aerial/satellite maps sometimes reveals new things to check out next time I’m in an area.

    A good handheld GPS can be had for below $200 these days, and I at least think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of several times over.

    However, I wouldn’t under any circumstances recommend anything made by Magellan – stay tuned for a blog post…

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