With bag already packed in my mind, work soon to be accelerated (and hopefully delegated as necessary), I’m, later this week, boarding a train due south to D.C., and onto Arlington, to attend the latter half of the Capitals now annual July tradition, the development camp.

I feel like I’m outwardly heading off on a “business trip” to our Nation’s Capital, but instead arranging a tryst with a mistress — in Capitals red.

Tall trees hanging over the road, feels like they’re staring me down.

-from Tall Trees by Matt Mays + El Torpedo

There will be use of the hotel bathrobes, room service, and honor bar, all enjoyed in blissful relaxation after days running along the Capital Crescent Trail and watching Capitals hockey’s future ply their craft and endeavor, relentlessly, to impress. (And I’m a development camp virgin, which heightens the anticipation, this midsummer week’s dream.)

But this Mid-Atlantic jaunt features no Client-9 at the Mayflower Hotel. Riding the rails from NYC to D.C. for Caps hockey is a pleasure in which I gleefully indulge any time of the year, and about which I don’t feel the least bit guilty. I have my Amtrak Guest Rewards number memorized like my SSN, and a last-minute travel checklist that I can execute in my sleep.

Tossing and turning the night before I leave, I’ll imagine the chill on the tip of my nose from spending hours inside a cold rink, on an otherwise stifling-humid July afternoon, eyes fixed on the future of the franchise.

Oh, and when I’m seated on that heroically early Thursday morning Acela, underneath Madison Square Garden in New York’s Penn Station, bound for Union Station D.C., I will surely be a neighbor to plenty of suits toiling away on their laptops, trapped alongside their superiors having to make small talk and “big idea” talk, or hunched and narrowed in front of their Blackberries, eyebrows furrowed, tense, anxious, all the way down the Northeast Corridor.

I’ll be relaxed, reading up on Eric Mestery and Braden Holtby, the latter a goaltending prospect that Capitals écrivain supérieur Mike Vogel recently singled out on the Capitals Report as one in the system to watch for rapid ascension.

And late morning I’ll arrive at that majestic structure atop the Ballston Public Garage, the Kettler Capitals Iceplex — brilliant glass panes angling toward the sky, gigantic display of the wordmark that proclaims a franchise dynamic, aggressive, maverick, aspirational . . . on the verge.

photo from washingtoncaps.com

photo from washingtoncaps.com

And just what will this year’s new crop of prospects think when they walk through those doors under that bold logo, and suit up in such a fantastic facility? They will think that they, too, are on the verge. Many of them will yearn to some day soon wear the Capitals red in front of the growing throngs a few miles away at Verizon Center.

Is it Thursday morning yet? How about now?

Vogs shared with us not long ago a very personal collection of tunes inspired by the Caps’ impressive season turn-around. And so, as a big fan of Canadian independent popular music, I present to you (as a reader experiment) a playlist of (lucky!) 13 tracks of all-indie and (roughly) new music from north of the border — a soundtrack to my pilgrimage to Kettler for the dev camp.

The playlist, you’ll see, is made possible by CBC Radio 3 (and therefore Canadian tax dollars – praise be to that government which amply supports music and art). Enjoy, and I welcome thumbs up or down comments, as your (second-hand) curator.