Twin Lights 9/28/08 - 50 Miles

Today, Stu and I rode in the Twin Lights Ride in Highlands, NJ. This was last year's most beautiful ride. This year...it rained, although it was still a pretty ride. I will definitely do this again. I took more pictures this week. Last week, I hit some rough road and my camera popped out of my bento box and smashed all over the road. (That's why you only saw one photo from ENY). It lightly rained for the first part of the ride, but thankfully the rain stopped by the time we reached the 20 mile mark. Here's the map:
That is a chocolate fondue tower and yes, those are marshmallows!

Escape New York 9/20/08-67 miles

Yesterday, I participated in the Escape New York ride up to Rockland Lake. This is only the second time that I have done this ride and it was even better than I remembered. We started at 122nd St and Riverside Drive, crossed the GWB to NJ and up to Rockland County. When I've done this ride on my own, I took 9W, but in the ENY ride, we took much more scenic routes through beautiful neighborhoods in Englewood Cliffs, Demarest, Closter, Norwood (NJ), Orangeberg, Blauvelt, West Nyack and Valley Cottage (NY). Thankfully, we avoided East Clinton Road (1.2 miles) in Tenafly. That road is a killer...the most difficult hill I've ever climbed. I'll have to remember that next time, we can turn right on Dean Drive and not go straight onto E.Clinton Road. The trade-off is a short but difficult hill up Walnut. It's only 0.6 miles but it feels like much more. It was a beautiful day for a ride! It was sunny and 71 degrees. I started at 8am and ended at 3pm. My ride time according to my bike computer was 5:42:39. I'm not sure how long I stopped to rest, but I probably needed a little more time because my legs were really getting tired. I ended up stopping on my own for a bit somewhere after the second stop. There were 3 rest stops for the 67 mile route. One at 21 miles, 35 miles and 55 miles. Lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fig newtons, bagels, oreos and at stop #3, someone made homemade brownies. Yum! Here's the one picture I took before my battery died. As of today, I have put 569 miles on my bike this season. That's more than last year! Hooray!

Here's the route for the next time we come back from Rockland Lake:

Piermont Rd becomes County Rd
L, QR to W.Clinton, Dean Drive (1.0)
L to Ivy Ln (@ light) to Hudson Ave to (0.5)
R to Elwood (0.1)
L to Lydecker (up hill) (0.1)
L onto Glenwood Dr, then R to Lydecker (0.6)
L to Walnut (0.6)
L to Woodland (0.1)
R to Pershing (0.3)
R to Summit (0.3)
L to Palisades Ave (0.4)

The Cloisters-9/13/08 -20 miles

Today we decided to ride up the West Side highway up to the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park. I took the ferry across to Manhattan to meet Nan and Stu at54th street and set out to explore the west side. Here is a photo of the beautiful George Washington Bridge.
This is us on the way up to the Cloisters.On the way back, we passed the NYC Swim Event. These people are swimming from the GWB to 58th street....in the Hudson River! Yuck!
Further down the greenway, we passed Fairway and some sailboats.