The Belmar Reconstruction Tour

Belmar is one of the more popular long rides that the club does. The ride is relatively flat with a nice stop on the beach in Belmar. The only downside to the ride is that you will have to deal with some traffic by the beach and either an annoying or hellacious head wind on the way back.  I usually don't do this ride until its short sleeve weather but I decided to take a trip earlier this year to see how the reconstruction of the boardwalk was going. Although Belmar didn't get as badly damaged as Seaside it still lost most of its boardwalk and had quite a bit of flooding.

Although they had predicted a chance rain for Saturday the rain ended early in the morning so by the time we started the ride the rain was gone and the roads were starting to dry. I had a large crowd of 12 people that included most of the regulars as well as a few people hadn't seen in a while including Jeff X.

Except for a flat tire the ride to Belmar was uneventful and even easy as we had a tail wind most of the way. There is not a lot real scenery on this ride until you get to the beach. I usually enter the beach by Sea Girt so that we have a nice leisurely 3 mile ride along the ocean. In the middle of the summer there is a lot of activity here but today it was mostly suffers trying to catch some waves. We did also pass wedding that was going on outside at one of the hotels.

The main attraction this time was the state of the beach. During Sandy most of this area was under a foot or two of water and most of the boardwalk and water front property got a little beat up. Although most homes survived the storm with very little structural damage there was quite a bit of flood damage that they are still cleaning up from. The good thing to see was that the rebuilding has started and is making good progress. Although there are still parts of the beach with the boardwalk missing a lot of it is rebuild. We saw long stretches if new boardwalk with just missing rails so it seems that by Memorial day most of it will be back.

Still there is a long way to go. Some of the public bathrooms were totally destroyed and are just now having their foundations poured. I don't expect these buildings will be ready until at least mid summer at best.

I had been down this area about a month ago and Ocean Ave had still been closed to traffic so it a nice surprise was that Ocean Ave was finally open (except for a small bridge that was out in Spring Lake). The other nice surprise was that our normal rest stop by the beach was open. In fact the owner told us that he had just opened a day ago (Duncan Donuts was still closed). Although they had some flood damage the place looks the same.

After a the break we headed back into the wind. It felt bad as we started by we eventually got into a rhythm and ground our way back to Etra. The wind was bad but not soul crushing. I wasn't planning a stop on the way back but some people were a little tired so some of us stopped in Freehold while others went on.

By the time we got back to Etra we had almost 70 miles in. We averaged just under 15 which wasn't bad considering its early in the season and we had a head wind for 30 miles. It was nice to visit Belmar and see that it is recovering. I'll probably head down there again later in the summer to check it out again.