42.7 mi / 12.5 mph / 362 ft. climbing
Home: Belleplain State Forest

Last night, there remained a mismatch between the mostly-empty campground and the mostly-full map shown by the online booking system. By this morning, the mismatch had been resolved. All the city folk finally arrived after punching the clocks in New York and Philadelphia and driving across New Jersey to claim their reserved spots in the woods for this holiday weekend, well after dark. Unfortunately for me (less so for Rett, who did an impressive job of sleeping), one of those claimed sites was right across from us, and while I never checked the time, it felt like the group of four friends were talking and laughing for at least a couple hours before they finally went to bed at 5:30am! The crazy thing is that they weren’t even drunk partying assholes; they were genuinely just setting us their camp (as relatively-inexperienced campers, in the dark), and simply seemed ignorant of the fact that people all around them might be sleeping at 4am. Which maybe makes it worse?

The day started with more quiet forest roads, had a couple towns along a busier highway in the middle (which included the day’s lone grocery store, like we’re in the desolate Mountain West or something!), and ended with more of those quiet forest roads. The combination of golden trees and 80 degree temperatures made it a prototypical “Indian Summer” day, as our weather continues to treat us far better than we deserve.

At one point we stopped for a roadside pee (another thing that we’ve rarely been able to do in the heavily-populated Northeast), and that’s when Rett noticed her Kula Cloth (aka, pee rag) was no longer strapped to her handlebars where it lives and dries. After a couple more miles of pedaling I conjectured that it probably got blown off by the 40mph winds on one of the high-speed New York ferries, and later photo analysis agreed. Sorry for the bit of pollution New York Harbor, I know you’re working hard to fix that!

In this state where we can’t make a campground reservation (due to their 2-night minimum), we’re living on the edge in a way that we rarely do as non-resilient old people. My worry-wart risk-mitigation method is to check the number of available sites every 8-12 hours over the few days before we arrive, to see how rapidly the number is approaching zero. In most cases, the number rarely moves (most people apparently make camping plans months in advance), but the number at Belleplain State Forest had actually been steadily decreasing, from 62 to 51 to 35 to 28. But since I’d seen that 28 number just an hour before arriving, I didn’t actually have any concern that the slope of the line would touch the Y-axis. So when I told the clerk I was looking for a site for the night, I had to suppress a laugh when she guardedly said, “Hmm…we don’t have many left….?” Uh, great, but “not many” is greater than zero, so just give me a site. #60, if it pleases you, thank you very much! Rett pointed out that she likely was just annoyed at having to do the work of registering me, and yeah, we’d prefer to just do it online too, if your system would allow 1-night reservations!

Our spot was pretty good for one randomly-remaining, but further down was a complete zoo, with big families and a million kids, movie screens way bigger than ours, bikes and scooters and fires and bright flashing lights. But the nice thing about loud-ass families with kids vs. 5:30am 30-somethings is that kids go to bed (and usually their parents don’t stay up drunk), and yeah, by 10:30pm the place was quiet, and never started up again.