While we aren’t yet ready to take off for Europe and Asia, we can still have some small adventures in our last year in the DC Region. In this case, we took advantage of a hot, humid, Friday evening in July to explore the Potomac River by kayak.
We’ve had a lot of rain this year. So much so that the Fairfax County Park Authority has only been able to do two outings on the Potomac to date. We were lucky enough to spot the event tickets posted on Facebook and decided to give it a go.
Even though it was a hot evening, with river temps in upper 80’s as well, the few thunderstorms earlier in the day had passed. We joined two naturalists and several other guests for two hours of paddling. We left from Riverbend Park Visitor’s Center, in the far north of Fairfax County.
The adventure started about 6:45 by crossing from the Virginia side to the Maryland side, heading upstream between Bealls Island and a pumphouse that provides drinking water to nearby Maryland.
The Potomac was safe enough for the trip, but the water was still moving relatively fast making our trip upriver a little difficult. It wasn’t terrible, but we did have to work harder than we had anticipated. We weren’t savvy about using the current behind rocks as a way to rest between more difficult sections with fast moving water. Thankfully, our guides for the evening were patient and taught us how to navigate upriver more easily.
After about an hour we had made it upriver to a spot on the Virginia side between Gladys Island and Minnehaha Island. We had a chance to see a heron hunting for food, some swallows, some deer, and other wildlife coming out for the warm evening.
After a few minutes relaxing in a large eddy it was time to return to our launch point at the visitors center. For all the work to get up river it only took about 15 minutes to float back and we were done.
Despite the quick adventure we both had a lot of fun. It was a beautiful evening, we enjoyed kayaking on the Potomac which would not have done ourselves, and created another of the memories from our last year int he area.