It was great to be back on a bicycle road trip.
I left late Thursday morning, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan, and caught a ferry that dropped me off in Highlands, NJ a bit after noon. From there, I bicycled down the Jersey Coast, through many beach towns that I had bicycled through before.
There is a good bike shop about ten miles from Highlands, and I stopped there to get a new battery put in my bicycle odometer/speedometer. That only took a few minutes, but then I talked for about 45 minutes with a customer named John, who is very interested in touring, if he can scrape together the time and money to take off for awhile -- he's often thought about bicycling out to see a relative in Oklahoma.
As I was approaching Asbury Park John, who left after I did, caught up to me and rode with me for a few miles into Ocean Grove, where I stopped for lunch. While eating I got an odd call from Jennifer, a family friend, who said she had just received a call from someone who reported finding my bank book and heart rate monitor by the side of the road in Highlands, NJ. #*&!!! I remembered taking some stuff out of my handlebar bag when I was sorting things out at the start, but I hadn't realized I had left things on the ground! Luckily for me, the finder had passed along his phone number, and so I was able to call him and arrange for him to mail the stuff to Cape May.
I am not sure if the lost checkbook episode was an auspicious start of my trip (illustrating how helpful people so often are) or an inauspicious start (illustrating how impending senility is making me very absent-minded!) but I know that the next conversation I had was definitely a sign of good luck. A young guy at a gas station was wearing an American University T-shirt, and our conversation went something like this:
Me: Did you go to A.U.?
Him: No, Catholic University, but my roomate went to A.U. for a couple of years and then transferred to Catholic University.
Me: Oh! I just asked because I graduated from A.U about 40 years ago. Did your roomate, by any chance, belong to a fraternity when he was at A.U.?
Him: Yeah. He was a Phi Sig.
Me: Really! So was I!
Him: Oh, were you! I went to a lot of Phi Sig parties, and I can tell you those guys really know how to throw a party! They were the best parties I went to in Washington.
Me: Great! I'm actually on my way to a Phi Sig party now, with some old fraternity brothers, in South Carolina.
Him: You're going to SC on your bicycle?
Me: Yes--like you said, those Phi Sig parties are really great. Worth traveling to any way you can.
In the late afternoon I crossed a bridge into Tom's River NJ, where I spent the night.
The next day I continued south, headed toward Mays Landing NJ, where I had a reservation for the night. This was pretty uneventful, except for a stop in the Lower Banks Tavern (in the Pine Barrens north of Egg Harbor). I just went in to fill by water bottles, but the owner turned out to be a very avid bicyclist, and we talked for about an hour. He raced in his younger days (I think he is now in his mid 40s) and has taken up racing again. Among other things, he told me he had once done 212 miles, from Seattle to Portland, in 10 hours. He had three bikes in the garage behind his tavern, and the one he seemed most attached to was a 1980 Nishinko 10-speed: he told me he had commuted to work on that bike in every job he had ever had, and that he now used it for "touring" except that he never got any more than one night off from his work. The bike was equipped with panniers front and rear, and he was planning to take a trip to the Florida Keys before long. His only other recent "touring" had been an overnight trip to Cape May, but he was very annoyed that he had to pay $55 for a campsite for his tent!
After a good night in May's Landing, I continued for Cape May. I stopped for a cold drink, served by a guy named Jeff. When not helping his wife in their business, Jeff is a professional sports fisherman in Cape May and in Florida. I had known that Cape May was a hotbed of sport fishing tournements, but I hadn't realized how big they are. Jeff explained that their big tournement this summer had about $1.3 million for the first place winner. Not bad, until you realize that the entry fee was $35,000 (they had about 130 entries). It seems to me that this is an extremely high entry fee and it doesn't seem to make sense to enter unless you know you are definitely among the very best fishermen.
Leslie picked me up in our rental car and drove me the rest of the way, shaving about 20 miles off my planned ride. I was happy with that, because it was very hot and I wanted to get to Cape May and go to the beach. I have now had four or five good days with friends and relatives in Cape May, and intend to leave early tomorrow to catch a ferry to Lewes, Delaware and continue on my way toward Norfolk, Va.
