On the Road (January 1st)

I started this blog knowing that reality would find me in Washington, DC for the first few days of January, attending a couple of family functions. This meant that I wasn't entirely certain that I'd be able to find time to ride a bike. Luckily, our nation's capital has an excellent bikeshare program called Capital Bikeshare. This allowed me to ride from Reagan National Airport to a friend's place in Bethesda, MD and stop at a couple of monuments along the way on January 1st. Total mileage: 13.1 miles.

If you recall, my imaginary trip begins at Montauk Point, NY and 13.1 miles gets me just out of the hamlet of Montauk and into Napeague State Park. Here's a map of my route:

I'm sure it would have been a beautiful ride, with the Atlantic Ocean on my left. I would have started by riding through Camp Hero State Park. Camp Hero has a really interesting history, including time as an Air Force Station before becoming a state park. You can also find all sorts of conspiracy theories about what the military was working on there, with some believing that it was home to things such as time travel experiments and contact with aliens. If you're interested, here's a link to the book that started it all: Montauk Project.

For a bit of fuel, I would have stopped at Goldberg's Bagels (everything with cream cheese). Near the end of the ride, I would've passed Cyril's Fish House on Montauk Highway. Cyril's is closed for the winter, but if you're ever in the area during the summer, stop by and drink a BBC. They are delicious!

The night of the 1st would find me camping out on the beach in Napeague (not actually permitted). The interesting trivia for this first blog is that Napeague's beach is usually closed for most of the summer because it is the nesting site for the piping plover. I had never heard of the piping plover, but it's the small, endangered bird pictured here:

They close down the whole beach for this little guy?

Anyways, there's not much to do in Napeague on a winter's night and I have a lot of riding ahead of me, so I would have called it an early night. There's riding to be done on January 2nd!