urban bicycle journeys

Arriving into New London CT by ferry the steeply gabled houses and rocky coastline immediately screamed “New England.”

New London CT is not a fru-fru place.   While not a complete wreck like Bridgeport CT or Trenton NJ,  New London looks like a working class town just trying to get by.   I find it exotic.  Its big employers are the U.S. Coast Guard and the large submarine construction base in Groton, just across the river.   My ferry landed in downtown New London.   I biked off the ferry and headed towards the address of an Airbnb.

 

 

 

This is the house of my Airbnb and the proprietor’s bumper stickered Volvo station wagon.  I had no idea what to expect.   It was an unusual Airbnb.

 

Her living room.

The Airbnb was a portion of an upstairs bedroom.    Most of the bedroom was my hostess’ art studio.

The opposite side of this small room was for me.   We shared a bathroom.

We found we had a lot of common interests and she was a pleasure to chitchat with.

That evening I biked the mile or two back to downtown New London to look for somewhere to eat.    There is not a huge selection of restaurants in New London anyway and on a Monday night many places were closed.   Thames Landing was only just OK.

 

The next day I bicycled east towards Westerly, Rhode Island.   This was my day’s route.

On the way out of town Muddy Waters Cafe in central New London is a really nice place for my kind of breakfast.    Those from Durham NC take note:  there was a Merge Records sticker on their front steps!

 

I crossed a high bridge over the Thames River.

I then bicycled east mostly on small and curvy roads, frequently with short bursts of very steep grades.

 

 

Brick walls were are ubiquitous.   I cannot imagine all the work in earlier generations hauling these stones out of the ground to enable trying to eke a living out of this rocky landscape.    You see these walls for miles through otherwise wooded areas, indications that these areas were once farmland.

 

I was still on the lookout for great clam chowder.   Clams and especially lobsters are pretty foreign in North Carolina.   Right near the Connecticut / Rhode Island state line there was a takeout seafood store with two chairs and one table for those who wanted to eat-in with plastic utensils.   After polishing off a bowl of clam chowder I ate $ 8.70 worth of amazing lobster salad, also sold by the pound.

 

 

I bicycled a long way through surprisingly wooded and remote-seeming land.    I was quite tired in the late afternoon when I pulled into the charming town of Wakefield RI.   There was a place called Brickley’s with very good house-made coffee chip ice cream.

I had not completely planned this bicycle expedition through Long Island and New England.  I had had vague ideas about going all the way to Boston.   One advantage with Amtrak is that it is relatively flexible.    I had had a great trip but I had spent enough money and I was ready to go home.  I haggled a deal over the phone for a quite nice (fru-fru!) conventional Bed and Breakfast in that same town Wakefield RI.  I booked Amtrak to leave the Kingston RI station at 7:11 AM the next morning, taking me all the way back on one train to my Toyota parked in Richmond VA.  I would be home in Chapel Hill NC by 8:00 PM that same evening.

Leaving at 6:15 AM I bicycled the eight miles to the station, almost all of it on a rail-trail bike path.

 

 

I have a special shout-out to TLC Coffee Roasters in West Kingston RI who I found at 6:55 AM.  They had, “to go” a large decaf coffee, refrigerator oatmeal for breakfast, and a quite good pastrami sandwich for lunch.    On Amtrak you should always bring your own food.

Tootie had a delicious dinner waiting for me in Chapel Hill when I got home.