28.4 mi / 11.0 mph / 134 ft. climbing
Home: Franklin Terrace Motel

After a few days of mostly-tailwinds pushing us down New Jersey, the winds flipped around overnight. So even though it was a shorter ride to our destination, I still adjusted on the fly to a minimal-distance option, one that kept us off the more-exposed coast longer than I’d originally planned. But rather than trading less distance for less peace on the roads (the normal exchange for such choices), we might have actually lucked into a higher-quality route. At least the first three miles on narrow Sumner Road were so empty and bike-path-like that I wasn’t entirely convinced that it was a public road, rather than someone’s private driveway.

Then there was the cute town of Dennisville, which seems to be the world-record-holder for Halloween-decorated houses, with nearly a 50% ratio. We stopped at a farmstand outside Stone Harbor, and then continued a few miles into town to eat the not-very-vegetably pumpkin creme pie that we bought. That’s where we finally returned to the seaside, five miles further south than originally planned, and two-and-a-half days after turning inland through Toms River. The route makes it look like we took a big loop to avoid Atlantic City, but really that’s just a side-effect of the gap in the road network that otherwise runs the length of the Jersey Shore barrier islands.

I’d done no research on the route, and was simply following the bright roads on RideWithGPS’s cycling heatmap, and it’s really pretty amazing how well that works these days. But I did decide to check one of the upcoming low-traffic bridges while eating pie, and was surprised to see that one of them was a toll bridge! I guess it must be something they do to push the traffic onto the big bridges instead? Oh, but I didn’t need find out whether cyclists must pay, because no one needed to pay in the direction we were going, hooray!

When Rett was a kid and her parents and sister would come down to Cape May for summer vacations to see extended family, her strongest kid-memories understandably came from the boardwalk-amusement zone of Wildwood. So we started at the north end and rode down as much of the boardwalk as we could. Then we pulled inland for beers at Angelsea Brewing (something Rett wouldn’t have done as a kid!) In this offseason, it was just us, the bartender, twenty empty tables, and a local doing R&D on his hot-pepper pickles (they were really good!) All day on this Sunday I had seen people wearing Philadelphia Eagles colors, so it was great to be able to just sit at the bar and learn a bit about the area’s culture from these guys: scrapple, cheesesteaks, and the gradual quieting of a Jersey beachside vacation town.

Rett in fact was having such a great time at the brewery that she kept ordering beers, and I had to snap her out of it to remind her that reliving her boardwalk memories was the main reason we were staying in Wildwood for three nights. Our earlier ride had showed that many of the boardwalk shops were already closed up for the season, and if any of the rides were still running today, they were unlikely to be running tomorrow, the guys agreed. So we settled up and returned to the busiest section of the boardwalk, yes, the rides there were running, but at the ticket window we learned this was their final day. In just under the wire!