The roughest part about camping, in my opinion, isn’t sleeping on the the ground or having to cook over and open flame. It’s remembering all your equipment. So, I’ve assembled a master list of things to bring. What else should I add?

• Equipment:
  tent
  sleeping bags and pads
  pillows (often forget)
  Flashlight, lantern, or headlamp
  duct tape
  ground tarp (forgot this last time)
• Cooking supplies:
  frying pan
  pot
  kettle
  spatula
  olive oil (in a plastic bottle)
  salt and pepper (also in mini containers)
  coffee mugs
  plates and bowls
  silverware
  chopping knife
  cutting board
  bottle opener (for beer of course)
  dish rag and sponge
  dishwashing detergent
  trash bag
  Bottled water
  (and food, of course)
• Cooking equipment;
  burner and kerosene
  cooler and icepacks
  charcoal
  lighter

• Washington Post: Weekend trip to Lynchburg. The Post profiles this quirky Virginia town as a “perfect place to while away a long weekend.”  There’s even the “hipster” Craddock Terry Hotel, which is housed in a converted shoe factory and contains a brewery. I’m sold.

• Washington.org: 100 free things in DC — Like many of these “top 100″ or “50 best” lists, this one contains many obvious suggestions. (really, the Smithsonian is free?)  However, I really enjoyed the first section, which detailed how to obtain free or heavily discounted tickets to cultural events.

• Yelp: Al Fresco dining and drinking in DC — Yelpers weigh in on the best outdoor dining. Personally, I like my back porch.

• DCist.com: Outdoor movies — While Screen on the Green may be history, the DC legacy of outdoor movies lives on. One highlight is the  NoMa (North of Massachusetts Ave.) showing of music documentaries. Check out it’s lineup here.

Here’s the very short video:

We skipped the rapids. The class V rapid trip that our friends signed up for cost $140 each, not suiting our cheapskate travel budget or my fear of tumbling out of the raft and bashing my head on a rock. However, trips on the milder sections of the river run about $50 a person.

Fallingwater:

Instead, we hit up the other watery attraction: Fallingwater.  The famous home was supposed to be a weekend retreat for the Kaufmann family of the Kaufmann department stores (now Macy’s). But Frank Lloyd Wright created a mansion of stone floors, cantilevered balconies and picture windows. Wright designed the home in 1935, but it still looks modern. The structure itself, hasn’t fared so well; the Pennsylvania Conservancy had to make major repairs to the foundation of the home.  I’m a sucker for architecture and loved Fallingwater. It was worth dealing with the crowds and having to order our tickets online (and pay the $2 surcharge). When we arrived for our noon tour, the day was entirely sold out.

Ohiopyle:

Also in the area, is the tiny town of Ohiopyle (pop. 77). The one-street village is entirely whitewater rafting outfitters and restaurants.  There is one bar, with not a single woman in it.

Fox’s Pizza Den: When we arrived in Ohiopyle, we were starving. And pizza seemed just right. This local chain sits at the corner of town and serves up a delicious Philly Cheese steak pizza. It also has on the menu a local creation, the wedgie. Wedgies are a sandwich served on a pizza crust instead of a bun.

House Cafe: I want to say only nice things about this restaurant, but I can’t. Sure, the setting, an old home with front porch and patio seating, was cute. The staff were friendly. But the food was over priced (almost $9 for a skimpy chicken salad sandwich) and the service horribly, horribly slow. Our lunch lasted a more than leisurely 2.5 hours.

Christian W. Klay Winery: Although buying beer in Ohiopyle requires an afternoon and a half tank of gas, purchasing a bottle of wine is not nearly so complicated. There’s winery ten minutes outside of town, located in a restored barn.  The decoration is cheesy, but the back porch is nestled in pretty rolling hills. Had it not been pouring when we visited, it would have been an excellent spot to sit and drink a bottle.

Before this trip, I assumed that a state famous for its craft brew (home to both the Troegs and Victory breweries) would have a plentiful selection of beer — and maybe even a few things we couldn’t get back in DC. Instead, we found ourselves driving from convenient store to gas station to supermarket and emerging from all empty-handed.

Finally, we got to a small shop in the center of Ohiopyle. The owner was used to tourists from the surrounding states being baffled by PA’s dry mini-marts.  When I asked her where we could find beer, she replied with a question I’ve never been asked before: “Exactly how much beer are you looking for?” I shrugged, and she laid out our options:

a) Purchase a six pack from a nearby bar with an “off-license.” However, you will be charges the same rate for the carryout drinks as you would pay to sit at bar and drink them.

b) Drive to the other side of the mountain and buy an entire case from a beer distributor.

With time to kill, we went with choice (b)  The distributor turned out to be a garage with a walk-in freezer attached to someone’s house. It was $31 for 24 bottles of Sierra Nevada, a decent price by DC standards. I know what I’ll be drinking for the next month.

Here’s what I plan to see instead:

View Larger Map

Here’s the links: Fallingwater, Gravity Hill, whitewater rafting in Ohiopyle.

Although, the city of Annandale has worked hard to move its image beyond being the suburban capital of Karaoke, it hasn’t worked well. There’s a reason for that.  The segment of Columbia Pike that runs through here is a strip of Korean restaurants. Many are BBQ joints, and the most popular is Honey Pig . At 7 pm on Friday night, the restaurant was packed (below). The line for a table trailed out the door.

We waited about 40 minutes for a table. Our party of two seemed puny next to huge groups of tipsy classmates, coworkers and families. The crowd was about 95% Korean with the occasional confused-looking white American. We were definitely the odd ones out.

I accidentally ordered a massive amount of food. Although the smallest order per table permitted is two plates of meat (you order slices of meat and prepare them on a table top grill), we somehow ended up with three.  An entire course — sliced beef and octopus tentacles — went directly into the takeout box.

After we ordered, the waitress brought our tray of meat and disappeared.  I waited for her to bring out some tongs — or some other way to cook the meat. She didn’t.  As a debated whether cooking the pork with my own chopsticks would mean imminent food poisoning, the oil on the grill started to burn.  The waitress reappeared, turned it down and started to cook the pork  herself.

After that, she wouldn’t let us touch the grill.  When we took pieces of pork off the grill and placed them in our bowls, the waitress snatched them back. The slices weren’t sufficiently sizzled.

The Post Hunt, which takes place this Sunday, started out as the Hearld Hunt in Miami in 1984.  But when co-creators Gene Weingarten and Tom Shroder moved to Washington to work for the Post, the hunt came with them.

Calling the Post Hunt a scavenger hunt is misleading; it feels more like a living brain teaser.  Hunters travel between several downtown locations where puzzles are set up.

Last year’s Post Hunt centered around four mini puzzles, which were answered by a number. Clues were everywhere: in the architecture, in the comic section of the newspaper, even inside a fortune cookie. Check out the video below to see if you can figure out the answer to this puzzle.

Af

Last year, after the hunters solved all the puzzles, they used the numbers from each to crack the “end game puzzle.”  This is where it got really hard.  Hunters had to decode cryptic messages, race to the outer reaches of the city and repeat a code to a secret Post Hunt operative. Out of the hundreds of team who participated, only three finished. This year’s contest promises to be just as challenging.

Post Hunt 2009 starts Sunday, May 17 at noon at Freedom Plaza. It lasts until 5pm.  Playing with a group is recommened, but remember that you’ll have to split the $2,000 prize with your teammates.

Bedford, Pa., isn’t the only place around here with a gravity hill. A two hour drive from DC, Burkittsville, Maryland, the site of 1990′s horror flick the Blair Witch Project. Unfortunately, this hill doesn’t have it’s own website, but it is captured on YouTube.

I hope to stop off in at the more famous (and better marketed) gravity hill on the way to a camping trip at Ohiopyle, Pa., over Memorial Day weekend.