Day 4

41.8 mi / 12.4 mph / 1647 ft. climbing
Home: Martha’s Vineyard Family Campground

Today was a ride around the west side of the island. At 42 miles, it’s the longest ride we’ve done over the last 10 days, but since we were unloaded, it was easy to do it at a higher speed than any of the shorter ones.

Many of the island businesses use an outline of the island as part of their logo, which is seems like bad marketing to me, simply because there’s something aesthetically-unpleasing about the shape of this island. But since we’re riding across it and not flying above it, we get a better view. And by the end of the day we’ll have covered almost the entirety of this lumpy-ass island.

Martha’s Vineyard has been described as really bike-friendly, which is emphasized by all the bike-rental places (even our campground rolls out a dozen matching bikes into their bike rack every morning, despite there being no one in the campground who might rent them). I guess that must be mostly due to the network of off-street paths that parallel a few of the main roads, which tourists ride for recreation. Because once those paths end and you’re dumped out onto the roads, well, they’re fine for us, but I imagine they’d be a terror for the average bike-renter who never rides on narrow two-lane roads.

We continued to the western tip of the island at Aquinnah, where the already-low density of houses dwindles to nearly nothing, yet cars and tourist buses fill the big parking lot to see the Gay Head Light and the Aquinnah Cliffs. The viewpoint down to the cliffs was in fact a beautiful scene, but what I most saw from the platform was the superlative majesty of New Zealand, half a world away. While we were on those other islands for seven months, the beauty around every turn was obvious, but mostly it was just meeting (a high level of) expectations. So it’s required time and distance to properly absorb what was fully in front of our faces every day there. Tourists here are taking a bus ride all the way across the island, or paying $15 to park, and even in this off-season, crowding in the dozens on the viewing platform. All to see something that we’d see an equal or greater version of four times during an average day’s ride across New Zealand. That’s no insult to this island, and in fact I’m glad that it’s helped provide a perspective that I couldn’t see when ensconced in Middle Earth.

We had to backtrack a bit as we headed home, because the loop route would have required taking a bike ferry, but that had stopped running a couple weeks ago (the other side of the “off season” coin). Just the fact that a bike ferry exists out here far from any of the trails suggests that plenty of tourists do in fact ride the roads, so maybe they’re tougher than I give them credit for.

Maybe during high season, there are so many bikes that they clog up the traffic even out here, which makes the riding more-comfortable? Either way, the number of people still on the island make us really glad that we aren’t here in the high season; it seems the crowds must be overwhelming then. We never tried out the extensive bus system; the fact that it runs all the way out here reflects a major theme in ‘Jaws’: the island’s dependence on tourist traffic, and the lengths the government goes to to keep them coming. In this case, enabling non-cyclists to come to the island without bringing their cars is a much more noble approach than burying news of shark attacks, but the motivation is the same in both cases.

Once back across the narrow neck, we headed to the small village of Menemsha where we got lunch at a surprisingly-legit seafood market. The place with the bigger crowd had a clean, modern interior, so I’m glad that the short line was at the utilitarian 100+-year-old dockside building, with fish coming into the back door straight from the boats moored four feet away.