This 9-mile trail goes from one end of Monmouth County to the other.
This is my latest New Jersey trail discovery. Well, kind of. I knew the Union Transportation Trail existed, but it was disjointed for several years while being built. The last segment was finished early last year, however, and now it’s a 9-mile stone-dust trail in Monmouth County stretching from the Mercer County line to the Ocean County line.
We explore the Mount Rose section of the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail, sandwiched between two gaps. With a lot of luck, one of those gaps might be closed this year.
Slowly but surely, the 22-mile Lawrence-Hopewell Trail is being built. My understanding is that the section from Bristol-Myers Squibb on Carter Road to a 90-degree bend on Cleveland Road will be built this year, taking the trail off a main thoroughfare that has no shoulder and can be unpleasant, especially if you don’t like riding with traffic. (SEE UPDATE BELOW) Right now, though, there’s only a small section on BMS property before you hit a “trail ends” sign (and then it becomes a private trail to the BMS entrance).
It’s easy to spend a weekend biking in the Princeton area.
Time to put some my knowledge about this area in one place. And for those who don’t want to just bike, there’s kayaking/canoeing and walking too.
Princeton, halfway between New York and Philadelphia, is more than the home of an Ivy League university. George Washington’s victory at the Battle of Princeton on Jan. 3, 1777 kept the American Revolution alive. Alexander Hamilton was alongside him, and Aaron Burr is buried in town.
A 15-mile route from Riverside, NJ, to the Roebling Museum.
This is part of an old Roebling factory, the company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. The East Coast Greenway goes past it — now on the road but eventually (I hope) on an off-road trail. That would be the Delaware River Heritage Trail, which is slowly pushing south from Trenton and Bordentown, and then up from Camden. It would be an alternative to riding from Trenton to Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania side. (And it’s no secret what I think of the current route.)
Like the mini bridge outside the Roebling Museum? Stopping for a proper museum visit next time! Several picnic tables too, so it’s a prime rest stop.
We decided to explore from Riverside, following the Delaware River north. Our route took us through small communities and shuttered factory sites, like a large one for U.S. Pipe, once the largest employer in Burlington. (here’s some history about the company in New Jersey.)What will become of this prime riverfront location … and how much environmental cleanup is needed? Can gentrification reach this far, aided by transit? Waterfront condos one day? Or a new warehouse? The RiverLine light rail (which tracked our route) is right there … but so is a freight line. I just hope there is public access to the river (and yes, a trail).
Today, the 15 miles to Roebling are almost all on road; the East Coast Greenway route has a brief trail moment through a park, and we tested out a riverside walkway with a sign ordering you to walk your bike past an apartment building, per city ordinance. While there is usually a shoulder (I would not call them bike lanes), this is a route for people comfortable riding on roads, even on a Sunday morning. As we rode through an industrial area, I wondered about truck traffic during the week. One had a multi-use path out front… that dead-ended in the grass.
For those who don’t want to bike back (and yes, we did bike) or suffer mechanical trouble, there’s always the RiverLine. We were never that far from a stop.
Here’s a bonus for those who don’t ride on a Sunday: Junior’s Cheesecake. We biked past the company bakery in Burlington (sorry, New York). There’s an outlet there, apparently selling both “perfect and imperfect” cakes. Of course, you’d then have to balance it on your bike. Or be with a large group of hungry cyclists who can eat it all at once. (We went for a Portuguese restaurant in Riverside with scarily huge portions.)
See the bike in the background of the sign? I figured the 2,000 miles referred to bike miles, hopefully in the form of trails and not just paint on the side of the road or, worse, sharrows. After all, it was right by a paved trail.
And I thought: Imagine if this really was what government wanted to do. New Jersey has 21 counties, so divided equally, it would be nearly 100 miles per county. Or do it by population, which would come at the expense of those really south and west, where they are too far to commute to the job hubs of NYC and Philadelphia. And if ideas for trails that were at least 5 miles long were prioritized, encouraging projects across municipalities and reducing the odds of random, disjointed trails not even connected by bike lanes … wow. (And the East Coast Greenway in New Jersey would be done! So would the Capital to Coast Trail, which may be coming back to life.)
But this is why I know this was all just talk around the time of the millennium: the governor on the sign is Christine Todd Whitman, who left office in early 2001. Usually every new governor gets his name on every sign possible as quickly as possible. Guess none of them wanted to own this one.
And the trail itself? We stopped at the Woodbine municipal center on the other side of the grassy median to ask where it goes. The receptionist had no idea. No clue about the name either. Turns out it’s the 3-mile Woodbine Railroad Trail following a section of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad. It connects the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge and Belleplain State Forest. Or at least peters out on what I hope are quiet roads. Downtown Woodbine looks like it has seen better days; the only commercial activity we saw was a Family Dollar store and a butcher’s shop/grocery. Would promoting the trail (and creating a small loop for casual riders) create a bit of economic pop?
Two metric centuries in two days and lots of sights along the way.
Thursday was the last day of summer and Friday was the first day of fall. What better way to mark the change in seasons than with a long bike ride to the Shore and one last chance to wade into the ocean?
The inspiration for this ride was NJDOT’s High Point to Cape May route, which runs 238 miles from the northwest corner of the state down to its southeastern point. Some people are crazy enough to ride a version of this in one day to mark the longest day of the year, but we were only aiming for a little over 60 miles each way (also known as a metric century), starting and ending off that route.
120+ miles in two days? Call us crazy for doing even that if you like. But I see it as good training for that big East Coast Greenway ride next month.
We picked Batso Village as our starting point because it was a convenient meeting point for the three of us, coming from two parts of the state — and the people running Wharton State Forest would let us leave our cars overnight. Our destination was the North Wildwood home of Mary Jo and Bill, good friends of one rider. Thank you again for hosting us … and for feeding this famished rider!
Thursday was a beautiful sunny day with a wind from the north, so when we reached Mays Landing, it wasn’t a hard decision to head east for the Shore and then let wind keep pushing us along. We quickly discovered that our route to the beach was the same that the MS City to Shore ride would be using two days later. Ocean City was our first beach town, proudly boasting its bike-friendly credentials as soon as we crossed the modern bridge with sweeping views of the Great Egg Harbor Bay and used by plenty of pedestrians getting in their steps.
We rolled through several beach towns, each with their own personality (some clearly for weeklong party rentals, others with fancy second homes), all with plenty of construction and often separated by old two-lane toll bridges (bikes exempt, yay). The joys of off-season riding: no traffic keeping you from quickly getting from one distant traffic light to another. The downside: what’s open is limited — and by that I really mean ice cream shops.
Given that Hurricane Sandy wasn’t that long ago, it was disconcerting to see how many homes aren’t elevated on these narrow spits of land. Condos have gone up above marshes on the inland side of bays, which just seems to b begging for trouble. And you don’t need a hurricane to hit to do damage, as we discovered in North Wildwood, where just the waves from Hurricane Jose took out much of the sand dunes a few days before we arrived. Pumping sand back onto the beach every year must just be something a town budgets for.
Sunny day flooding here?
On Friday, we opted not to fight the headwinds along the coast and quickly made our way inland, picking up the more direct High Point to Cape May route. The roads felt a little busier, though with generous shoulders. I wondered if someone who biked the area regularly would have picked out some quieter (if longer) stretches, or whether the smallest roads would have turned sandy. Regardless, good training for traffic in the Carolinas.
The day might win for strangest road trash ever: a wetsuit. Was it flung out of a car or pickup truck in anger? Or did it bounce out of a truck bed or from the roof of a car? It wasn’t something we could pick up (unless we wanted to wear it), so we just whizzed by. Hopefully someone went back to retrieve it (and the plaid shirt nearby). We also passed on stopping for what appeared to be a bike lock, figuring that, too, was of little use to us.
What else did we find?
North Wildwood was getting ready for its Irish Weekend, described as the largest Irish festival on the East Coast and attracting about 200,000 visitors. Even if you’re not Irish, you want to pretend that you are and hang something green from the house, just to keep away the drunks. Glad we missed the crowds.
Gearing up for 200,000 Irish Americans
Spotted along the route:
A hat tip to the Revolution and an unusual 9/11 memorial in Mays Landing (have you ever seen one with photos from all three sites?):
We try a new bike ride that takes us further south in New Jersey
Here’s a hat tip to the Anchor House riders … our Labor Day ride was a 57-miler that included the 2013 Cory’s Ride (named after a 15-year-old Anchor House rider who was killed on the last day of the 1998 Anchor House ride).
This took us from the edge of Allentown, which has been on many of our rides, past so many farms and fields of the Garden State as far as Southampton — about as far south as Cherry Hill. Definitely mostly new territory for us. It’s south Jersey, though, so it was essentially flat. (The hilly ride planned for Sunday was rained out. Such a *shame*… though I really need more back-to-back days in the saddle as the big East Coast Greenway ride approaches.) Continue reading “Bicycling to points south … in New Jersey”
And in New Jersey, instead of poppies we found … fields of amaranth?
Also rows and rows of zinnias and coxcomb, but they weren’t as striking.
We also came across this historical marker as part of Sunday’s 45-mile ride to get me ready for a 385-mile East Coast Greenway adventure. Got to say, the connection to greatness in this case seems pretty weak as these things go. But I googled him anyway … he was born in 1686 and died in 1736. And he had a brother named Abraham to boot. (And a son named Abraham too, but it was John, his first child and whose grave says “Virginia John,” who leads to Honest Abe.)
This is my latest New Jersey trail discovery. Well, kind of. I knew the Union Transportation Trail existed, but it was disjointed for several years while being built. The last segment was finished early last year, however, and now it’s a 9-mile stone-dust trail in Monmouth County stretching from the Mercer County line to the Ocean County line.
This is part of an old Roebling factory, the company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. The East Coast Greenway goes past it — now on the road but eventually (I hope) on an off-road trail. That would be the 
Exploring by bicycle 