Tagged: Cold Spring

Daylight Savings Ride

Pocantico Hills

Today is the first day of our clocks reverting back to Standard Time. There’s a lot of opposition to Daylight Savings Time and ending it once and for all, but I actually enjoy it and wish we could observe it year round. Those of us living on the eastern edge of Eastern Time can get more out of the day if it sunset would be after 5:00 PM. In other words, make our Standard Time one hour later.

As Daylight Savings Time ends, so does the opportunity for eight-hour bike rides away from the city that require morning train rides. Even if the weather holds up, the days are getting shorter and our rides must also accomodate the dwindling daylight. In short, any ride must end by 3:30 or so because by 4:30, it’s already too dark to ride safely without lights.

Pocantico Hills

For this final Saturday of Daylight Savings, I joined two other club members for a ride east of the Hudson River. The ride started in Central Park and headed up to the Bronx and Yonkers then along US–9 until Irvington. After that we headed up to Pocantico Hills[1], but didn’t stop at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Not only is it hard to get a reservation, but they don’t have a place to stash our bikes.

Down Bedford Road

From there we headed to Croton Falls to stare at the dam. This is not the same place I visited back in the spring and again along my heat stroke ride to Cold Spring, but it’s still very nice. It made for a nice rest before heading up to Carmel[2].

Dam That's Nice

The eighteen-mile stretch from Carmel to Cold Spring, along NY–301, is one many cyclists know well. It has a nice seven mile stretch of rolling hills along the beautiful West Branch Reservoir and then you climb for about five miles. Once you reach a peak after passing lovely Canopus Lake, you coast downhill for about six miles into Cold Spring. That last part is fun as you reach top speeds around 40 mph and make that satisfying six-mile descent in about 15 minutes.

At Last Cold Spring!

  1. I confirmed that it’s pronounced Po (as in “Po-Boy Sandwich”) -Can (as in “cannery”) -Ti (as in “tin”)- Co (as in “cord”).  ↩

  2. Unlike the Carmel in California, this is pronounced Car (as in “carpet”) and Mole (as in “molar”).
     ↩

Sometimes You Have to “Settle” for a Ride to Cold Spring

Having missed Saturday’s ride to the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills, I took a day off on Thursday to make up the ride. There were two complications. First, the earliest weekday off-peak train for Poughkeepsie leaves at 9:44. That’s two hours later than the first weekend bike train and under the best of circumstances I wouldn’t start pedalling until well after 11:00 AM. I had resigned to getting a late start and finishing sometime in the evening. That was fine since I kept the whole day free so I could ride, but something happened on Wednesday.

My weeknight softball team, the Ramblers, had to play a third game in our league’s semi-finals. We had split the first two games of the series on Wednesday and we had to play the third and deciding game on Thursday. I had to come back by 7:00 to play in that game. Riding to Ashokan would have been out of the question.

Instead of taking two trains and riding nearly eighty miles in the Catskills, I rode to Cold Spring via the tried-and-true Bike Route 9. I would have to take the 4:19 train from Cold Spring to make it back to New York by 6:00 and the 7:00 game.

full

In all, it was a tad over sixty miles to Cold Spring. I had planned on riding through Harriman State Park but I was concerned about having enough time so I opted for a more direct path along Bike Route 9. I had never taken this route past Rockland State Park so it was a new experience for me.

The route is clearly marked and with signs so it’s easy to follow. However, there was one place where the route appears to disappear. Between Tompkins Grove and Iona Island, the path directs you off US-9W to a lightly travelled road. But the road ends.

I backtracked a mile to the bike route’s junction with 9W and continued north along US-9W/US-202. A good deal of this route was uphill but nothing overwhelming. There were some nice views and a nice downhill after the climb. About three miles later, I was reunited with Bike Route 9, and I continued through Bear Mountain State Park and across the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River and on to Putnam county.

As I did when I rode to Cold Spring in July, I ended the day at Whistling Willie’s on Main Street. I could have made the 3:21 train but opted for a burger and a beer. The food and drinks are great after a ride, and better than the Depot, but the staff is a bit cold. “Good Food. Fresh Service,” as Ed Debevic’s used to boast.

Hot Ride to Cold Spring

Determined to ride to Cold Spring at some point this weekend, I rode there Saturday morning, going through the Bronx, Tarrytown, Croton, and Peekskill. My friend John was headed to nearby Breakneck Ridge for a hike, ending his day in Cold Spring, so it seemed like an opportune time to ride there since I could meet up with him upon arriving in Cold Spring.

Tarrytown-Croton-Peekskill-Cold Spring

It was a hillier ride than I had expected. Ride with GPS reports that I climbed more like 4,688 feet over 66.4 miles. I was well aware that it was going to be about 4,000 feet of climbing over about 65 miles, but it felt much harder than that. It had been about three weeks since I ridden my road bike so I wasn’t in the best shape for a long-distance ride.

Elevation: Tarrytown-Croton-Peekskill-Cold Spring

Hardest of all was the heat. My Polar reports that the average temperature throughout the ride was 92°. It’s entirely reasonable to think that the temperature was around 96° at the hottest time of the day. Ouch. I frequently stopped for water. My first water stop was in Riverdale at a Chase bank branch to fill up my bottles from their water cooler. I stopped again in Tarrytown at a 7-11 where the clerk gave me the stink-eye when I brought in my bike and bought a water bottle. (I should have paid with my AMEX to anger him even more.) I stopped again at a camp site called Tea Town where they let me use the bathroom and fill my bottles from their filtered-tap water dispensers.

The heat killed my appetite, and I didn’t eat very much on this ride. I consumed my first solid calories nearly forty miles after starting. It was a super hot L’Arabar, which wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be. Then I ate half of a Clifbar, and a couple of Clif Shot bloks. I ate a turkey sandwich at Mile 55, at a deli in Cortlandt Manor just north of the US-9 and US-6 junction.

When I arrived in Cold Spring, I was exhausted. I did get a little burst of energy when I realized that I was only four miles out of town. When I turned left from US-9 to NY-301 to Cold Spring, I was screaming down the hill at nearly 35 miles per hour. It was exhilarating.

I stopped at Whistling Willie’s in Cold Spring to cool down and rehydrate. They were reasonably bike friendly, letting me stash my bike in the outdoor patio where I could keep my eye on it. It was also a better option than the usual standby for hikers and cyclists.

After risking heat exhaustion and seeing only five other cyclists on the road once I left Manhattan, this might be a better ride for a day in late August than early July.

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Bastille Day “Pedal and Paddle” Weekend

Bannerman Castle

When I was younger, I wasn’t crazy about Bastille Day being in the summer mostly because we never got to celebrate it at school. Instead, on our last day of school, Bastille Day was grouped together with all of the kids born in the summer gathered at the front of the classroom, and we toasted a batch of juice and cupcakes.

But over the years, I’ve enjoyed Bastille Day in July. For one thing, having lived a decade in a place with seasons, it’s much less depressing to have celebrate this day in the summer than, say, in the middle of winter. For one thing, we get to be outside, and over the years, I’ve taken advantage of the warmer climate.

This past weekend, Sarah took me on a weekend trip to Cold Spring. I had been through here twice on bike rides, but I never got to stay there. Sarah reserved us a room at the celebrated Pig Hill Inn, we brought our bikes on the Metro North, and we headed up for a weekend.

IMG_1328

On our first day, we biked to Hyde Park, following Route 9D and Route 9, and two paved rail trails, and then for a visit to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. The trip to the Presidential Library was a personal mission of mine to visit as many as I can. So far, I’ve covered the Nixon, Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt, so I have a lot of ground to cover still. We got lost a lot so the bike ride took a long time, but I’m anxious to try it again.

To Bannerman Castle

The second day was an amazing kayak trip to Bannerman Island to tour the ruins of Bannerman Castle. Having never really kayaked before, it was really amazing to be able to paddle nearly 3.5 miles each way to an abandoned castle on an island in the middle of Hudson River. While the tour was ho-hum, and we didn’t get to see as much as I had hoped, getting there by kayak on a 90 degree day was really invigorating.