The surf's not up on the Memphis riverfront

I've been dealing with some pain in the left side of my neck this weekend.  It's a pinched nerve or some such thing, caused by sleeping on it wrong, or maybe by dealing with that massive table I've been working on.  I get something like this several times a year.  It'll run its course.  But until it does, I'm hating it.  It doesn't interfere with paddling, but it makes the rest of my daily existence much less pleasant than it should be.

Yesterday I headed out in Joe's V10 Sport surf ski hoping to find some wake-surfing action out on the Mississippi.  But there was none: the only barge traffic was a rig heading upstream far up the river, out of my reach.  My body was sort of tired from the week's strength work and table-wrestling, so I decided it was just as well that I make it a semi-recovery day.  I made a couple of nice spirited ferries across the river and then returned to the harbor and paddled easy back to the dock.

I felt fresher in the boat this morning and I headed back out to the river, thinking surely I couldn't be unlucky with the barge traffic a third straight time.  But in fact, I could: the river was empty as far as the eye could see.  I paddled all the way down to the big bend south of downtown and saw no powerful commercial vessels of any kind.  Now I had to paddle back up the river to the harbor, so today's paddle turned out to be more of a long-distance slog than I'd intended.  I threw in several hard surges to make sure I wasn't just practicing going slow, but it wasn't as much fun as surfing.  The next wave I surf may well be in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaking of which, on Friday I started doing some packing--gonna be a spendthrift and pay the fees to check two bags.  The yellow and black one is for paddles and whatever paddling clothing/gear I can cram in there, and the green one is for street clothes and stuff:

My flight is scheduled to take off Saturday evening.  So, yes, I started packing eight days in advance. I'm not getting excited about my trip or anything.


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