Category: Adventure

Another light day today. 35 miles. Not intentionally, just the start of the day took ages.

Getting out of Cherry Hill, combined with finding a place that sold batteries, took a fair while. It’s funny really when you have everything you need strapped to your bike, it becomes something that you don’t want to leave if you can’t see it. Even if you lock it up, it’s still a potentially easy target so selecting where you stop is quite important. I.e. somewhere with a big window out front, railings etc.

After the faff of leaving Cherry Hill, and passing on the outskirts of Camden, I had a bad feeling today might be a look-out-for-traffic-urban-day. But it turned out great a couple of hours later.

I ended up on an awesome road called Kings Highway / New Jersey Route 41, through Clarksboro (Gloucester County). Wow. By this point it was magic hour, and the weather as good as it gets – the sun was dropping and the light was brilliant. The autumn colours and low sun turning everything purple was pretty striking. The houses immense and classic – something like you’d see in The Addams Family. The fields vast and sparse. Probably one of the biggest reasons today wasn’t very mile-heavy was the constant stopping to take photos.

Click the image below to open the full panoramic:

It was awesome to watch a group of about 10 deer jump out of some woods and run across an adjacent field.

Today was also the first time the roads have been suitable for listening to music and audiobooks which is something I’ve been looking forward to. Really makes it easier to pedal for longer stints and increases motivation. Album of the day was Passenger – All The Little Lights. Check it out.

Barked at a few times today (by dogs, not people). Made me think of the stories of people on tour being chased / attacked by dogs. If you’ve done anything similar and have any tricks in managing dog attacks, it’d be great to hear in the comments below. Any states coming up that it’d be worth getting spray for? What’s your avoidance strategy?

Got ‘in the zone’ for the first time, maybe it was the amazing scenery and the cals from last nights dinner, or perhaps it was just getting in to the swing of things, but the cycling was totally enjoyable, the pain non-existent, and there was a strong wish for the light to remain. It was ace. A full day of that would be incredible. This distance-cycling thing’s something special, huh?!

As for the bike and gear, it’s all going pretty well really. Bike’s running smoothly. Still no punctures which is surprising considering the amount of glass in the shoulders over the last couple of days. Saddle pain, after yesterdays light day, was much improved, ready for a full day’s push in the morning. Gotta be due a stint of bad weather soon surely? Seems too good to be true for the last few days.

Ended up in Carneys Point, which is the town on the Delaware River which means tomorrow will be a new state – Delaware, and Maryland in a couple of days. Didn’t ever plan on going down that strip of land but it’s had a lot of recommendations so have adjusted the route a little bit. It was always a Vague Direction anyway. Looking forward to finally joining the ACA route in Virginia most likely.

Kept the main camera in the bag today but was snapping away on the iPhone. Here’s a few snaps that mainly involve a lot of sky.

Bit knackered so will keep it quick.

Set off from Jamaica, NY, way later than expected (they had a waffle maker, can’t say no to that). Only managed to get going at about 11.15am. But it’s all a learning curve – from now on days will begin a lot earlier than that and won’t, for the most part, involve waffles.

Goal one was to get to George Washington Bridge, to then get on to the mainland. Getting through New York was slow (Queens – Williamsburg – Manhattan). Stop start due to traffic lights. The actual traffic wasn’t too bad, just a case of keeping your wits about you. Basically like cycling in Manchester, it’s quite well thought out for cyclists in the main part.

Get over George Washington Bridge and it’ll all speed up, right? Oh how expectations can be deceiving. Here’s a video which shows the earlier part of today, leaving NYC. Wrong!

Just to explain, my plan was to leave New York via the fastest SW route (the GPS has a mode to switch to cycle-able roads), to then join the ACA Atlantic Coast route near Ambler, PA in a couple of days, where the roads are friendly and there should be some places to camp.

From GWB it got a bit more complicated. It got dark, so the lights came on to guide the way. Upon entering New Jersey there weren’t many places to stop. It was urban, the whole way. No parks and, unlike the video above indicates, no wooded areas. In a van or a car, being ‘urban discreet’ is easy, you can just park in a corner of a supermarket car park. It’s so tricky to be subtle in an urban environment in a tent with a massive bike though, so I kept on cycling until a good place was found. And it never came. The places I passed through weren’t places that would be conducive to a good nights kip in a tent. So reluctantly, and with the help of an awesome fellow lost-person, Jaquin (quite confident that’s not how you spell her name) finding the zip code on her phone, I used the GPS to point me in the direction of a room. Can’t be a regular thing as the budget isn’t there, but needed in this case. Finished cycling around 8.30pm.

 Anyway now that todays weird route is out of the way, hopefully the next few days will have a real impact on ticking some of the route off. After a late start and the stop-start nature of leaving New York (resulting in a low average speed), and still covering nearly 60 miles, it’d be good to tick off some bigger miles by setting off earlier and having a better plan. It was bloody good fun all in all, now it’s a case of keeping trekking on down the coast.