Adventure Tours

by Neil Woodburn on

The centerpiece of this year’s Men’s Journal Adventure Issue is the adventures
themselves.  The May issue highlights a great selection of
“Classic Adventure Trips” and tells
us how to do them right.  Although I’m always a little skeptical when such articles point us directly to
tour outfitters who will help us do such things, the writers have at least included enough information to whet
appetites and get the old adventure spirit pumping.

While some of the Classic Adventures can be accomplished easily enough on your own—diving the Great Barrier
Reef, cycling through Tuscany, and surfing Scorpion Bay in Mexico—others are far more involved and you might do
well to consider some of the tour operators even if you hate this type of organized travel as much as I do. 
Let’s face it; you’re never going to raft the Zambezi River or race a sailboat across the Atlantic on your
own. 

Paddling to Swindburne Island

by Erik Olsen on

Took me a couple of days to get the pics off the camera and to loosen up the shoulders, but I figured I’d post some of
the pics from my first big paddle trip of the season. I headed out with a couple of dudes from the Manhattan Kayak Company on Sunday and we made for little Swindburne Island, a wee speck of dry land a few miles out
from the Verrazano Bridge. Some of the subsequent pics will show the broken down asylum that was to quarantine immigrants to the U.S. that were found to have been carrying contagious
diseases like TB upon arrival at Ellis
Island.

Our trip leader was the fearless Eric Stiller, who runs MKC and is an all around good guy, not to mention a superb paddler and
exactly the kind of guy you want to be in a tandem boat with when it’s the first outing of the season and you’re about
to put in 27 miles. But we had lovely weather the whole way and old Mother Hudson helped us on the way out, carrying us
along on her soft, generous shoulders.

Anyway, here are some pics from the endeavor. Hope you like them.

This one is right as we headed out from MKC, which is at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. That’s Joe and Tim, two
guys I met at MKC.

Here’s Peter, Tim and Joe paddling beneath
the geometrically pleasing IM Pei buildings at the World Financial Center.

This is Stiller at the foot of Manhattan.
River was damn cold, hence the hand warmers.

The group heads out from Chelsea Piers.


Paddling Music Video

by Erik Olsen on

It’s not
everyday we experience a convergence of music, paddling and art. But when they come together the result can be
surprising and quite pleasing. To wit: I think that paddlers and non-paddlers alike will enjoy this cool music video from the tip of a
canoe. Very stylish, very colorful, the piece was produced, I understand, for RES
magazine, one of my favorite art/video magazines, most of all because they provide a nice DVD with each issue if
you are a subscriber, which I am. The DVDs feature experimental and otherwise cutting-edge videos and music that make
for superb lunchtime viewing.

Paddling Iran

by Erik Olsen on

Of all the places you thought you might paddle
some day, I’ll bet Iran never made the list. Well, maybe it should have. The adventuresome Becky Bristow heads to this axis of
evil  to try out the bouldery rapids of the Sezar River. The story here is filled with interesting little cultural
anecdotes the likes of which you’re unlikely to find in a story about, say, paddling in Wyoming. To wit: almost as soon
as Ms. Bristow gets out of her boat, the locals swathe her head in a scarf, lest all that uncovered hair stir the
longings and unravel the turbans of the local tribesmen. The group described here hits some sweet Class IVs, and
overall make the paddling in Iran seem pretty darn inviting.