Sunny Sandy Hook

When it is 44 degrees on a Saturday morning you usually don't think its a good day to go to the beach but it was. I had wanted to do a ride to Sandy Hook some time after Labor Day but wasn't able to do until this Saturday. It was colder than expected but it was sunny and suppose to get to the mid 60s. Laura, Pete, Jim and Ricky joined me at Monmouth Battlefield park for the ride.

I decided to use my northern route to Sandy Hook with a small modification. Although there are a couple nice roads on the way to Sandy Hook there are also some busy roads we have to ride on so its more about getting to Sandy Hook than about the ride itself. There are some interesting sites along the way. We went through the old Bell Labs which has a water tower that is suppose to look like a transistor but I'm and electrical engineer and it doesn't look like any transistor I've every seen.

There was also sign with a scary drunk clown on it. I didn't get a picture of it but Laura did so it will probably be part of her post. The new twist to today's route is that we took the Henry Hudson trail for a mile after the rest stop then headed down to water where the ferry is to NY and rode along the bay. It was an unusually clear and sunny day so we had the best view of NY I have ever seen on this ride.

The path along the bay also gave us nice views of the marina and Sandy Hook itself. The path does turn to dirt for about a mile but it is very hard packed and easy to ride on a road bike. In fact it was smoother than parts of the paved trail.

When we got to Sandy Hook we road out a few miles to take some more pictures. I actually took my shoes off and walked on the beach for a bit to get some more views of NY.

After I got the sand off my feel we headed back home along the usual way with a brief stop in Little Silver for our final rest stop. On our way back to the battlefield there was even more traffic than normal as there was some kind of festival at the battlefield orchard. There were cars parked in every field and grass surface so we had to slowly make our way up the shoulder and around cars and people.

We ended up with 65 miles. This will probably be the end of beach season so any more trips to the beach will probably have to wait until next year.