44.5 mi / 11.2 mph / 374 ft. climbing
Home: Candia’s AirBNB

Despite the generator and bright exterior lights from the RV next to us, it felt like I had been asleep for at least a couple hours when the sound of something crawling around on our picnic table awoke me. Shit. I listened for a few seconds, and there it was again, the unmistakable sound of something moving the aluminum windscreen for our stove (which I had intentionally left out, along with other cooking supplies). I unzipped the tent and got out to shoo off the presumed raccoon, only to find our table completely untouched. Instead, the sound was coming from our other-side neighbors cooking dinner(?) at 1 AM. I grabbed our lighter off the table to make it seem like I had gotten out of the tent for a purpose, and not reveal that night noises had fooled me. But seriously, what are you doing up at 1 AM?!

The next alarm came at 5:30 AM, when another couple (neither of our neighbors, I don’t think), began a loud abusive fight. She was doing most of the yelling, and I’m pretty sure that she at least hit him, and it’s possible blows might have flowed the other way too. Eventually his mantra of “I just want to go home. I just want to go home” must have come true, and we could no longer hear them, but by that time we were awake anyway.

Of course we were the only ones up and about in the light of day, but since it was only 47 degrees, I guess I couldn’t really blame the drunks and assholes for remaining passed-out.

There had been no one to register with when we arrived yesterday, and we weren’t sure if there was anyone in the office when we rolled out this morning; let’s just say that our motivation to search was not very high. I had read previous cyclists being told that the didn’t need to pay, and the ranger who talked to Rett yesterday about the hospital-mystery had suggested the same to her, and Suffolk County’s bike hostel program is based around the idea that “Bicycle camping allows all the virtues of escaping from a fast pace world and stay a night in one of Suffolk County’s beautiful campgrounds”, so the fact that Blydenburgh lacks a specific bike hostel area doesn’t seem to negate that broader philosophy.

Still, if there had been evidence that management took any pride in their campground here, I would have made a greater effort to give them some money, if only to support the bike hostel system at their other parks.

Immediately upon leaving the campground we needed to make a left turn at an unsignalized intersection on the 6-lane Veteran’s Memorial Highway. Tuesday morning traffic made it impossible to ride into the left turn lane, and even dismounting and crossing the six lanes on foot required a long wait and a bit of luck.

But after that, the rest of the day’s ride actually felt less-stressful than yesterday’s, even though we were moving through even higher-density suburbs of New York City. I had spent extra time last night reviewing every part of the day’s route, and was glad that reality matched the plan.

Part of it might have been the higher density working in our favor. When we turned south onto Brentwood Ave., we rode through miles of standard-lot single-family houses on a city-block street grid, nearly all the way to Long Island’s south shore. All those streets provide a lot of options to find lightly-traveled ones.

Density also allowed us to get our first McDonald’s lunch in a while (in a place where an employee was required to open the bathroom door for us), and then another pumpkin-spice spree at Trader Joe’s.

“This would have been your dad’s Trader Joe’s”, I joked with Rett, because a minute later we crossed the bridge to Island Park where he had grown up after his family moved out of the city. We only had to go two blocks out of our way to find the house at 13 Deal Road. Like Trader Joe’s or the other modern shopping centers, the building at that address was likely not the same as when Ken lived here. But the feel of the neighborhood was likely not too far off, with the elementary school and playfield across the street maintaining the same openness that Ken remembered, and the pedestrian pathways between houses providing secret shortcuts to pass through to the next block.

The fact that it echoed the Edison Park (Chicago) neighborhood of my own childhood also suggests the feel has persisted across time as well as geography. The housing stock was only somewhat similar, so a good part of the echoes may have been literal: the planes flying directly overhead to land at LaGuardia, just as they rumbled over my head at O’Hare. There also might be something about it being a haven for the city’s police/firemen (Ken’s father was an NYPD detective).

Rett called her dad from the driveway, and it was fun to match his memories with modern reality. Part of the reason we knew to come here was that during our visit with Ken in August, he talked a lot while we were watching the Olympics about playing volleyball on the beach and surfing. That’s certainly a part of the area that doesn’t match my childhood neighborhood!

We crossed another bridge to come to Long Beach, the third and final island in this stack of islands, and were soon on the boardwalk, finally with nothing but ocean to our left all the way to Cuba.

The Atlantic Beach Bridge was the final bridge, taking us to the next barrier island (technically a peninsula) of Rockaway. The Internet has various advice about crossing this bridge (walking/riding on the sidewalk vs. the roadway), but since we’re well past beach season, there was very little traffic in its six lanes. It’s a toll bridge, but the Internet advice to just ride around the rightmost gate was helpfully correct (at least no one came running after us).

And then we were in New York City! Our second arrival to the city in two months, from opposite directions, and this time we rode completely into the city proper.

And, despite being one of the furthest-flung neighborhoods of the city, holy hell did it sound like New York City! Our AirBNB unit was on the second level of a detached house, but plenty of mid/high-rise apartment buildings are nearby, and there was a near-constant cacophony of honking horns, wailing police and ambulance sirens, and occasionally, a train rumbling down the elevated tracks across the street.

Day 2

We just completed a run of 20 nights where we had slept in our tent for 16 of them, a new record. So despite the NYC expense, we took two nights under this roof, with the ability to do laundry as a key benefit. I also gave a much-needed wash to our sleeping pad and did some more seam-sealing on our tent. Things you notice need attention when camping that much!