Rock, Rock, Rockaway Beach
"It’s not hard, not far to reach. We can ride to rockaway beach." – The Ramones
Actually this is a somewhat bastardized quotation. I left about the part about hitching the ride.
But in any case, riding to Rockaway Beach was what Brad and I had in mind this morning. It was my last Sunday ride of 2004 and we decided to make it a good one.
We did the usual shot across the Manhattan Bridge, through dowtown Brooklyn, and up the slope into Prospect Park. From there, we did the ride toward Coney Island down Ocean Parkway. But we took a left at Avenue U and rode through some great ethnic neighborhoods until we got to Marine Parkway.
We passed Kings Plaza shopping mall, where The Gotham Gal had her first big job, running the cosmetic floor at Macy’s Kings Plaza in the early 80s. That brought back some memories!
As we passed Floyd Bennett Field, Brad got a flat and we stopped to fix it.
Then we crossed the Rockaway Inlet on Marine Parkway Bridge. The views were awesome from the bridge.
Once we reached Rockaway Beach we rode along the beach, rode through the really nice neighboorhood of Neponsit, and then through town and back along the beach.
We went back across the inlet on Cross Bay Bridge, where we got an incredible view of JFK Airport.
We rode through this cool little town on an island in the middle of Jamaica Bay called Broad Channel. And then through the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.
After we crossed the end of Jamaica Bay, we realized we were about an hour and a half from Manhattan by bike and I had to be home in an hour.
When we got to Howard Beach, we stopped at a nice Starbucks, which are everywhere, and asked where the nearest subway station was.
It turns out we were a couple blocks from the A train’s Howard Beach subway station, which was the nicest subway station I’ve ever been in.
The ride home on the express train took 45 minutes and it was my deadline of noon when we came back up for air at the W 4th Street stop.