New York, NY to Seaside Heights, NJ

42.0 mi / 12.9 mph / 229 ft. climbing
Home: Franklin Terrace Motel

Today was the culmination of our Month of Ferries: two routes in one day! The alarm went off at 6:30am, and we made it out the door of our AirBNB by 8:25am, 5 minutes earlier than planned. Looking at multiple SteetView photos of the ferry terminal last night had me nervous, because nearly every one showed a line of people waiting. This was an MTA ferry, part of New York’s public transportation system, just like the subway, so there are no reservations, and if we didn’t make it on the 9:15am, we’d miss our connection and our day would be completely blown up.

Morning big-city riding through Rockaway; buses, emergency vehicles, forklifts in the middle of the road, it brought all our bike-commuter skills back to the fore.
Our first view of the Manhattan skyline, in tiny form at top right.

My nerves turned out to be a waste of energy, because we were the first to arrive by a mile. In fact my worry then became the opposite: why was nobody else here?! Was it because they know that the ferry isn’t running (despite what the real-time status said on the signboard)? Finally a couple other people showed up, and then the boat appeared from nowhere right on schedule. And then 20-30 other people suddenly materialized, regular commuters who have apparently learned to trust its exact timing and passenger-demand. I guess it’s a whole different universe on summer beach weekends, when Reddit users said you need to get in line more than an hour before the scheduled time of your boat if you want to be on it.

Us, and only us, waiting at the Rockaway Ferry Terminal.
A closer view of the Lower Manhattan skyline from Rockaway.

The 55-minute ride to Wall Street in Manhattan cost a mere $4.50/person, with our bikes coming for free (limited bike space was another concern, but again was no issue with today’s light load). That’s nearly twice the subway fare, which we could have taken as well, and is only slightly-slower (but could have saved us a 3.5-mile bike ride). But the bike-wrangling would have surely been more-difficult, and why pass up another boat ride? It felt a little odd that we were the only boat on the water in the quite-large Jamaica Bay, but of course that loneliness ended when we crossed under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and entered the whirlwind of the Upper Bay with Lady Liberty directing traffic near its head.

Plenty of room on the New York City ferry from Rockaway.

Another big advantage of the ferry over the subway is that it dropped us literally one “gate” away from our connecting “flight” to New Jersey aboard the (private) SeaStreak ferry. We didn’t even need to step off Pier 11 and onto the streets of Manhattan, though Rett did, to acquire a Pumpkin Spice Latte (with NYC’s walkable urbanism taking her right back to the Chicago lakefront days).

Shortly before the 11am departure, a girl shows up on the pier and asks who needs to buy tickets. “Round trip or one-way?” “One way,” I respond, “and with bikes, if that matters”. She says “ehh…$56” waiving the $3/bike fee out of either kindness or laziness. Either way, thank you! And also thank you to the random guy earlier who I mistook for an employee, yet nonetheless removed his AirPod and graciously and accurately answered this dumb tourist’s questions about tickets. I again grudgingly admit that New Yorkers are pretty cool.

The Brooklyn Bridge. For a while I thought we’d be riding across it to Manhattan and the ferry, but our detour to Long Island’s south shore made that route a lot less desirable.

A fellow cyclist carrying a heavy load asked us at the pier if we were starting or ending our journey. Neither, but this was the exact place that Dennis and I started our East Coast Tour 14 years (and 1 month ago)! The day was just as blue and beautiful as it was then, though this time I didn’t go up on the wind-blown deck of the SeaStreak. I did remember to turn on my phone’s speedometer app though, and it had us cruising at 37mph, the catamaran shooting up a rooster tail of white foam behind it.

A couple of New York icons, the Statue of Liberty and the Staten Island Ferry.
The first half of the SeaStreak run was simply a reversal of our run into Manhattan, though leaving I could get better photos since the back windows of the SeaStreak weren’t covered in salt spray.
Disembarking our SeaStreak ferry at Atlantic Highlands, NJ

I don’t know if it was the 14 years or the 1 month, but there was no ferry to Sandy Hook like I took with Dennis. Instead it dropped us inland from the Hook, and we had to ride east for several miles rather than starting immediately south down the Jersey Shore. But that meant we got to explore a cool coastal bike path that was new to me (and of course Rett).

Riding the Henry Hudson Bike Trail
The entirety of the Manhattan skyline (with some of Brooklyn in front), seen from the Highlands-Sea Bright Bridge in New Jersey
Sea Bright, the first of many thin barrier islands/peninsulas we’ll chain together on our journey south.
Rett riding into the sea (at least the car will take the plunge first, maybe snap her out of it).

Until we reached the boardwalk at Asbury Park, I recognized almost nothing from 14 years ago. Maybe that was because it’s changed (definitely many of the seaside developments were newer than 2010), or maybe it’s because we rode an insane 88 miles that day, more than twice what we’ll do today! There were massive apartment buildings, modest single-family homes, and opulent hedge-hidden estates, all mixed together in a somewhat-jarring hodgepodge. Also we passed the highest density of professional-grade basketball hoops (glass, rectangular backboards) that I’ve ever seen. Nearly every other house seemed to have one. Is South Jersey some kind of basketball development hotbed?

A scene highlighting the jarring “diversity” in housing styles in this part of the Jersey Shore.
I think this was some sort of church building, but it wouldn’t have been unusual as a private residence.
We stopped and ate lunch here at Asbury Park’s architectural ruins, which unfortunately the boardwalk no longer runs through.

Riding on the boardwalk is officially prohibited in Asbury Park (outside of the very-practical 3am-10am hours), but in this off-season it was clear that nobody cares. The relative-emptiness of the boardwalks carried through to the wide beach-front roads with miles of mostly-empty parking. For the millionth time we were grateful for the freedom to visit places outside of their peak tourist madness.

Empty boardwalk riding.
Empty road riding.
A good example of the not-just-a-stereotype “style” on the Jersey Shore. “Tacky” or “gauche” don’t even quite describe it.
But, the beaches here draw people both with and without taste.

Our ferry timing meant that we didn’t even start the main portion of the day’s riding until noon, so thankfully tailwinds allowed us to still reach our destination well before dark (where we stayed in our first sub-$100 motel since New Zealand, thanks again to the off-season emptiness of motel-heavy Seaside Heights).

With the Northern Lights visible even further south than us, I walked a block east to the beach, thinking that I’d get an unobstructed and relatively-dark view of the northern horizon. Except…I hit the beach right at the Seaside Heights boardwalk/amusement park, and while it was completely empty, the Ferris wheel and other rides we all lit up, the vendor-stalls’ neon signs were glowing, and one of those ultra-bright video billboards was blasting me directly in the face. Oh well! Nonetheless, my phone could extract some color from the dark sky, and once I saw what my phone saw I could dimly and occasionally see it with my own eyes. I’m glad to be able to say that I “saw” the amazing astronomical phenomenon, but honestly the late-night walk through an abandoned beachfront carnival will be better-remembered.

The Aurora Borealis, seen from the beach at Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

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