Burlington City claims a number of New Jersey firsts, but I am looking forward to the day the Delaware River Heritage Trail gets this far south and eventually connects to Philadelphia via Palmyra as an alternate route on the East Coast Greenway.
One cool highlight of our 30-mile loop: The factory town of Smithville, where the American Star bicycle was built in the 1880s. In that era of penny-farthing bicycles, this one apparently had the small wheel in the front, rather than the back, apparently to prevent you from tipping over. Not that the sculpture in the front reflected that.
But with the World Cup finals beckoning, a tour of the mansion and the truth of the design will have to wait for another visit.
Another fun site, this one in Mount Holly. Cute name, huh?
The bottom line from this weekend: Heat and back-to-back days is a tough combination. Last weekend I did two spin classes and a 30-miler. Thankfully a weeklong ride in October won’t be as hot. But I need to build up that endurance.
New Brunswick is on the East Coast Greenway, but we took the road, not the towpath (and ECG), for this ride to check out New Brunswick’s Ciclovia (more than 3 miles of streets shut to motorists and opened to people to bike, play and more). While we knew the first few miles, we’d never been to East Brunswick and Milltown even by car. So the bike option on Google maps it was.
And it was a nice route on generally quiet, flat roads well to the east of U.S 1. On weekdays, a few spots might be a bit hairy, but Saturday traffic was light, even by shopping centers. We crossed U.S. 130 at a light — easy. And when we finally did encounter U.S. 1, the overpass over it was straightforward, and on the way back, the driver of a white Mustang on the off ramp slowed and waved us in front. Sometimes New Jersey drivers surprise you.
Total miles, including wandering around New Brunswick: 42.
Random family at New Brunswick’s Ciclovia
As for Ciclovia … it’s not Manhattan’s Summer Saturdays, but then New Brunswick doesn’t have the density of New York. It was great to see little kids on their bikes, and there were some cool spots, like a rock-climbing wall and a skateboard trick park, and of course a fire hydrant turned into a sprinkler. There was a dance contest for little kids, a repair spot from New Brunswick’s Bike Exchange and a mobile New Jersey Hall of Fame that I thought was cool (and not just because of the air-conditioning break on a hot, cloudless day). But it felt too spread out for the number of people we saw, and you found stuff more by chance, such as the Hall of Fame that was hidden at the end of a side street.
Lots of Jersey roots
Ciclovia went beyond “downtown”, and it lacked a block party atmosphere in the neighborhoods.
So here’s my outsider’s take, fwiw: Ciclovia needs to be marketed more widely in the region, to get it filled up with people from neighboring towns, as happens with Communiversity is in Princeton, and to work with New Jersey Transit and New York bike groups to get the word out there and people coming down by train with their bikes. I’d open up space to every nonprofit that wants to be there, no matter where they are from, to help fill up the quieter spaces. I’d encourage downtown merchants to have sidewalk sales or bring restaurant tables outside. Actually, I’d have had it kick it off Restaurant Week, which we inadvertently discovered was also starting. Or play on the range of ethnic groups in New Brunswick and create a list of participating food stops and pitch it to the foodies. Honduran specialties, anyone?
And at one end, have a spot for teenagers and their bands, or high school bands, all of which would bring in their friends and families. It certainly works for our local farmers market. (Too bad there’s no Saturday market in New Brunswick that it could brush by from the side.)
But it’s also early days. New Brunswick’s first Ciclovia was last October, and this was the second of three planned for this year. Maybe it’s more crowded when Rutgers is humming with 41,500 students. And maybe it’s just a matter of time.
At any rate, it certainly was more popular than what we saw of Princeton’s Ciclovia in May, which took over a long stretch of underused roadway.
I’ve gotten a slow start to training for this ride, though fittingly, most of my riding so far has been on trails.
I’ve gotten a slow start to training for this ride, though fittingly, most of my riding so far has been on trails.
It started with the 150-mile Great Allegheny Passage plus a bit of the C&O Canal in May. (My friend Janet blogged it here).
Then the Brit and I spent one day biking 60 miles on the Pine Creek rail-trail in northern Pennsylvania, essentially due south of Corning, NY. It’s has some wonderful river views and really could be better promoted to capitalize on a length that is long enough to attract overnight visitors. But that tag of the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania”? Hyperbole, in my opinion. A nice gorge is what it is.
Regardless, it’s a pleasant place to bike. Just wish there were working water pumps that didn’t come with warnings about water quality. A side effect of fracking?
I also took an early and long lunch to bike 10 miles of the D&R Canal/East Coast Greenway as part of the Cabot Community Tour from Jacksonville, Fla. to New York City.
Time to get serious. Spin classes and bike rides to the train station and work aren’t enough.
You know I love to explore on a bicycle. And this year will include a great 325-mile adventure from Philadelphia through Washington and onto Fredericksburg, Virginia on the East Coast Greenway.
You know I love to explore on a bicycle. And this year I’ll take a great 325-mile adventure from Philadelphia through Washington and onto Fredericksburg, Virginia. I’ll be participating in the annual fundraising ride for the East Coast Greenway, a nearly 3,000-mile route from the Canadian border in Maine to Key West in Florida for bicyclists and walkers. While the route is already mapped, it now uses a mix of trails and generally quiet roads. The goal is to have it entirely on paths separated from traffic. That makes it suitable for people of all ages and bicycling ability.
If I need any convincing about the power of that sort of trail, I can just look at the Great Allegheny Passage, a 150-mile rail trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Md., that was completed last year and which connects to the 185-mile C&O Canal to Washington. I’ve just come back from riding it with three others. We ran into so many other cyclists – and it’s not even summer yet. One of the many things that impressed me was the economic power that a long, signposted, car-free trail can have. We heard about the woman who started her B&B with just one house when the trail was just partially finished, then bought the one next door and is now adding a third because there is so much demand. The company that shuttled us back to Pittsburgh is debating buying another vehicle because of the business it is seeing. Many establishments we patronized simply wouldn’t survive in their small towns without this trail. No surprise, then, that others are trying to build trails that connect to the north and west.
This is also why I find the East Coast Greenway so exciting. It connects cities, making it an urban version of the Appalachian Trail. It’s equally suitable for short distances, such as getting to work, as for long adventures. And because it links up local trails, such as the D&R Canal towpath that is just a few miles from my house, each becomes more useful to locals and more of a lure to bike tourists, just as with the Great Allegheny Passage. (Oh, and bike tourists have money. Just ask the Great Allegheny Passage boosters.)
You can learn more about the East Coast Greenway at www.greenway.org
I’ll be riding the 325 miles from October 5 to October 11 and have set a personal fundraising goal of $2,000. Every dollar will go to the East Coast Greenway Alliance, the nonprofit that oversees the creation of the East Coast Greenway, not to pay for my trip. I will be footing the bill for my hotel, food and travel. All donations are tax-deductible, and donations of $20 or higher will give you a year membership in the East Coast Greenway Alliance.
You can sponsor me online through this link or send me a check made out to the ECGA, and I will forward it. I’ll also be blogging about my training and the ride on this site, so come back for updates.
In the meantime, I hope you get out and enjoy the trails in your town.
Exploring by bicycle 