This past weekend my friends and I drove to Taconic State Park in New York for our first major hike of the year. We took the South Taconic Trail, which brought us along the top of Brace Mountain and then over to Mount Frissel, Connecticut’s highest point.

It was a steep climb when we first started off but the views were rewarding.  From the top of Brace Mountain we could see clear across the Hudson Valley and even as far as the Catskill Mountains.  At the top we came across three paragliders who were having a bit of trouble due to the strong winds.  We stuck around about 20 minutes or so to watch a launch only to see the guy spin upside down and then crash into the bushes – a firm reminder why I avoid doing that sort of thing.

From the top of Brace Mountain we continued on for about another 2.5 miles along the ridgeline towards Mt. Frissell, the highest point in Connecticut. The peak of Mt. Frissell is actually in Massachusetts, but the south slop lies across the Connecticut line and is slightly higher than Bear Mountain, the highest peak in the state.

It wasn’t the most enjoyable part of the hike.  Along the way the trail dipped down a bit and suddenly we were walking through a foot of melting snow. We made a quick stop at the tri-state marker and at the CT high point before eating a late lunch and heading back towards Brace Mountain for a few more great views of the Hudson Valley.

I’m back from the Paul McCartney concert!  Time for the recap:

Let me go back a few weeks to explain this.  About a month ago I
found out that Paul McCartney would be doing some type of live
performance in NYC to promote his new album Memory Almost Full.  Any
large-scale world tour would be postponed to next year due to "personal
issues" (his divorce from Heather Mills).  So being a huge Beatles/Paul
McCartney fan, I did some intense research until I found out the
details of what would be going down.

I found out that the show was going to be a small-scale "secret"
show about two weeks ago and that I’d have to win tickets through a
radio station contest in order to go.  Only a few hundred contest
winners and invited guests would be given tickets.  So after looking
through the websites of nearly every FM radio station from the
country’s major cities, I finally found a contest where you could enter
a raffle to win tickets by correctly answering 20 questions about
Paul.  I didn’t win.  But my friend Steph did, and she offered to take
me.  Amazingly, my friend Bret won as well and offered to take my
brother Justin.  So now we had 3 people from CT’s smallest town attending a concert that thousands of people from around the world were trying to go to, and I was one of them.

More below the cut.

I have now met one of The Beatles.  The other day I finally got to meet Sir Paul McCartney, the most successful popular-music composer and recording artist ever, at the Times Square Virgin Megastore in NYC.

It took some effort to get the opportunity.  Steph and I arrived 22 hours before he was scheduled to arrive.  We had expected maybe 30 people or so to already be standing in line, but instead found a line that wrapped all the way around the corner and down W 46th St.  A man towards the front of the line started passing down a list for people to sign, and we found that we were the 114th and 115th persons in line.