39.6 mi / 11.0 mph / 885 ft. climbing
Home: Blydenburgh County Park

This morning we were due for the first rain we’ve had in a while. A few sprinkles before we got up weren’t enough to even wet the tent, and the oak-leaf litter carpeting our campsite is a pretty forgiving surface when it rains. We moved under the nearby pavilion, now quiet and empty after yesterday’s rager, to make breakfast under very dark skies, with occasional rumbles of distant thunder. More bits of light rain came while we were under cover, but radar showed that we were getting pretty lucky in our specific location, with several bands narrowly missing us.

The winding route I’d quickly plotted with the help of RideWithGPS’s heat maps turned out to be less-random than I thought; every turn was unexpectedly signed as New York State Bike Route 25! In the last couple months in New York, we’ve added Routes 9, 28, 11, 27, 114, and 25 to our previous experience with long sections of Routes 5 and 11 (they’re mostly named after the numbered State Highways they largely follow). It’s a pretty nice system, and another benefit that New York produces in exchange for its relatively-high taxes. In an era when bike infrastructure philosophy seems to be “concrete-protected bike lane or nothing!”, the NYS Bike Route system is refreshingly minimalist (and thus, cheap!) It’s mostly just signs, and maybe occasionally a sharrows marking; rarely do its roads even have an explicit bike lane. But they’re well-chosen routes, with either wide shoulders on busy roads, or such low traffic on the minor roads that a bike lane wouldn’t add any value. And by attracting cyclists to these routes, the system (along with the wayfinding) gives drivers the notion that bikes are common and acceptable on these roads.

Unfortunately one of the busier sections combined with a really rough shoulder, and a steady light rain from the final band that we’d been riding through for more than 30 minutes. So it felt far from comfortable and safe to Rett. And then it got worse as the rain came down heavily for a 3 minute burst. In a total of an hour’s worth of rain, 57 minutes of it had done little more than getting our upward-facing surfaces damp, but those 3 minutes changed the whole character, filling our shoes, soaking our previously-dry socks, and requiring Rett to do a complete changeout once the last drops finally passed and we were able to take a break. That stupid 3 minutes cost us probably an extra 30!

We carried on a bit on the new (and lightly-used) North Shore Rail Trail, but the earlier effort of wrestling against both the rain and the cars had Rett exhausted, and wondering if she was additionally suffering an illness. But a trailside lunch break got her feeling significantly brighter, aided by the sun coming out just minutes after the rain passed.

To reach our campground we needed to leave the NYS Bicycle Route, and instead use some infrastructure that’s the exact opposite of the NYSBR philosophy: a two-way off-street bike path, running on the “wrong” side of a massive 6-lane arterial, constantly interrupted with shopping-center driveways. A driver carelessly blocked the ugly “entrance” to the path, and didn’t think to back up to allow us to pass; that was the culmination of the day’s accumulated stress for Rett, but thankfully she refrained from punching his car.

Blydenburgh is our fourth Suffolk County Park in a row, but the first that doesn’t have a bike hostel. At least I don’t think it does; there was no one at the office to ask, only a map showing the night’s previously-reserved campsites. It was surprisingly full (or at least reserved) for a Monday night, perhaps because it’s the closest campground from New York City on Long Island? Three-night minimums are required for reservations at the County Parks, but my understanding was that walk-ins could just pay for a single night.

The best site I could find was still quite exposed to our neighbors, so hopefully they’d be cool when (if?) they turned up. While I was in the shower, a ranger came by and was confused to find Rett at Site #40, because he had just talked to a couple who told him they needed to go to the hospital, and they were at Site #40. Their best guess was that it was our neighbors who simply misread the signs and didn’t realized they were actually Site #38. That would be a better result than someone else turning up and claiming that we were on “their” site, though our neighbors being people who needed to make sudden hospital runs did not feel ideal either.

Because overall it was a very “trailer park”-feeling campground. One of the RVs had a chain of extension cords running into the men’s bathroom to plug into an outlet, people were running generators everywhere, and one of the water spigots couldn’t be fully turned off and was creating a mini-lake between the sites. Even acorns dropping like bombs from the tall oak trees contributed to the creation of a nerve-wracking atmosphere (the mini-bombs banging into the aluminum picnic table made me bounce as high as they did).

Eventually our neighbors turned up, though it was dark by then, and the light of their headlights blazing into our eyes made them even more-invisible to us. The guy was vocally friendly, apologizing for the headlights and saying it wouldn’t be long, though it was probably 30 minutes, during which they kept the engine running too. He could have easily re-pointed their SUV, and most of that time they seemed to be in their tent anyway? Similarly, he fake-asked (because no one would say “no”) if we minded if he burned some incense: “we need something to keep the mosquitos down”. Uh…there haven’t been mosquitos around here for weeks, so that “excuse” just makes me more suspicious. I had no interest in inquiring if they had been to the hospital. Keep those worms in the can please!