Excursion Washington DC – Fairfax, VA

Excursion Washington DC - Fairfax, VA Sep 30,2015 On this planned day of rest in Fairfax I did the usual thing a long-distance cyclist needs to take care of when he has the opportunity. Here is a tentative list, incomplete surely but it will give you an idea ...:

• air and dry wet tent
• enjoy luxury of shower and warmth
• wash clothes - all of them without going naked 🙂
• eat, eat, eat good homecooked food
• work on my blog (well, I let that slip a bit because I was with friends and we had so much to talk about ...)
• go through gear for the umpteenth time ... this time I can experiment a bit because I know I am going to come back to DC and fly home from here, so I will try a different and  leaner gear setup for some days.
• study maps and weather forecasts ... more on that later!

Fairfax has an REI outdoor store which I looked up - an outdoor person's candyshop!! I bought a replacement spoon for the one I lost and a new merino wool first layer shirt which feels so good plus a waterproof phone holder. Why didn't I have one already? Well, I usually plot my gpx-files on komoot using the laptop and then transfer them to my waterproof Garmin etrex 30 . But I have come across the situation in which I spontaneously need to do some re-routing and in my experience the OSM-maps I have been using on the Garmin tend to lead me astray whereas komoot is more reliable in keeping me on cycle roads or trails. And then again I realized it was raining. Si I looked at the weather forecast and saw a huge hurricane system moving north towards the coast from the Bahamas to the US ....