Thirty Miles on a Bike.

I just had an amazing day.

A new gay.com friend, Chris, suggested we get together and take a bike tour from this book he has called 25 Bikes Rides in New York City, or some equally pithy title. I figured, "What the heck?" so we decided to do a 20-mile bike ride around Jamaica Bay. I know what you're thinking. "You just spent two months in Pittsburgh where you didn't have to ride more than a mile in any direction, aren't you a wee bit out of shape for a ride that long?

I thought the same thing.

 But as it turns out, I came through the whole ordeal well. I'm tired, but not so tired that I think I'm going to be feeling this for the next month. So that's good.

Anyway, we started out by meeting on the A train platform at Howard Beach in Queens.  After a little trouble figuring out how to get out of the station -- it's recently been renovated and reopened as a connector for the AirTrain to JFK Airport -- we managed to get down to street level and found our way to the start of the bike route.

So we headed south across the bridge to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Reserve, a place that was -- how to put it -- very interesting.  It was obvious that the island is making a sincere effort to preserve the wild lands for the animals there, but the edges of the reserve, at least those that border the bike path, are filthy and littered from one end of the island to the other.

At the far end of the reserve, we crossed another bridge over to the town of Seaside, and followed the bay around through the towns of Seaside, Rockaway Park, and Belle Harbor.  I remarked to Chris that these little seaside towns look the same from the Carolinas all the way up to Maine, but he didn't agree with me.  We did agree that the way some of the houses are built on top of each other to allow everyone access to the water was, frankly, a little ugly.  But property costs being what they are, I don't imagine many people can afford to have large tracts of land right on the bay.

In any case, after we pedaled along through those towns, we ended up in Jacob Riis Park, named for an early 20th century immigrant who became a rather famous photographer and social commentator.  The park (and the boardwalk that runs along the sea was one of the pet projects of Robert Moses.  You win the prize if you know who he was.

After we had a nice lunch of chicken salad on bagels (man, that was good chicken salad... thanks Chris!), and some snack carrots, we continued along the boardwalk until we came to the site of Fort Tilden, an abandoned army base that's been turned into a bit of a  nature reserve, too.  We wander the trails around the Fort for a while before backtracking and crossing the Marine Parkway Bridge into Brooklyn.

I've often wondered just how far out into Brooklyn Flatbush Avenue goes, and today I discovered the answer.  It runs all the way to the water at Jamaica Bay!  As soon as it touches down into Brooklyn, the roadway of the Marine Park Bridge becomes Flatbush Avenue.

Also at the foot of the bridge on the Brooklyn side is Floyd Bennett Field, a former air field that's been turned into an amazingly eclectic mixed-use recreation facility.  All the old runways are now bike, motorcycle and car paths.  In one corner of the airfield, we came across some folks setting up to shoot some movie exteriors, and tucked in to the end of one of the old runways is a remote-controlled airplane site.  We came across some hobbyists flying their planes around and even got to watch a rather spectacular nose-first crash into the tarmac.  It happened so fast that there wasn't even time to mutter "oh, no" from the moment we'd figured out something was going wrong to the moment of impact.  I imagine the owner of the plane was more upset about it than we were, but it was weird.  The plane just disintegrated on impact, spewing bits of balsa wood like a piñata that had been burst, and the weirdest thing is that the sound reached us after we'd seen the impact.  It was kinda startling.

Anyway, we spent quite a bit of time exploring Bennett Field, and between our sojourns there and the extensive exploration of Fort Tilden and the Jacob Riis park, we added a good ten miles to our already-planned route.

So finally we turned north again and headed back toward Queens.  We decided to make a stop at the Canarsie Pier (I've always wondered exactly where Canarsie is, and now I've been there!), where I saw an incredibly hot Russian guy fishing with his friends.  Needless to say I could have stayed the rest of the afternoon, but Chris dragged me away.  It was probably for the best since, seeing as how I found the guy attractive, he was almost definitely straight, so I'd have likely ended up getting my ass kicked for making cow eyes at him.  We rested for a while just off the pier and had ourselves some ice cream.  By this point in the day, I was well and truly beginning to feel all the riding, and we still had a good five or six miles to go.

At one point the bike path went onto the shoulder of the Shore Parkway, or at least it seemed to, which freaked me out.  Chris kindly agreed to backtrack to a point where we could get off the Parkway and make our way back to Howard Beach on regular streets.  I can't say we went through the best of neighborhoods, but thankfully Chris has his book of street maps for all five boroughs with him, so it all worked out in the end.

We made our way back to the subway station (or, at least in this case, the "elevated train" station) and hopped an A train back toward Manhattan.

All in all, it was a really great day, and I hope I get to do something similar again, soon.  It just never, ever ceases to amaze me all the fun to be had, and stuff to be seen, and history to be learned around New York City.

For now, though, I need a bath and a good night's sleep, 'cuz I'm planning to get started painting the apartment tomorrow.  If I can walk, that is.