CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: planning record, not independently verified geometry.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distances and riding times are planning figures. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Cliffside sweepers, river road and a proper day away from Manhattan. 92 km round from Middletown - plan on about 1 h 35 of riding. The stops in between: Port Jervis, Hawk’s Nest cliff road and Delaware River view. It keeps to quiet secondary roads.
Onions are the quiet fame of Orange County, New York, and the fields lie just north of Middletown. The black dirt region, a flat basin of ancient lakebed soil dark as coffee grounds, was drained in the nineteenth century and turned into some of the richest farmland in the Northeast, growing onions, lettuce, corn and sweet potatoes, and in autumn the roads are lined with trucks loaded with sacks. Middletown itself, a small city of about twenty-eight thousand, grew up as a railway junction and a manufacturing town, and its old brick downtown has a faded but friendly feel.
Read the complete Middletown fuel gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Next is Port Jervis food stop.
Port Jervis is a river town at the point where three states meet, and the meeting is the first thing the place wants to tell you about. At a spot where the Neversink River runs into the Delaware, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania come together, and a stone monument, set up in the 1880s, marks the point. The town itself lies on the New York side, with the pale hills of the Kittatinny Ridge in New Jersey rising to the south and the Pennsylvania bank across the water at Matamoras. About nine thousand people live here, and there is all the fuel, coffee and breakfast any rider could ask for.
Read the complete Port Jervis food stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Port Jervis food stop is where this day stops to eat. Next is Hawk’s Nest cliff road.
Route 97 between Port Jervis and Barryville is one of those roads that every rider in the north-east seems to know, and the section called Hawk's Nest is the reason. The road was cut into the face of the cliff high above the Delaware River in the 1930s, and for a few kilometres it clings to the rock, with the rock wall on one side and a stone parapet on the other, and the river a long way below. The curves are tight and sinuous, the views through the trees are wonderful, and the whole stretch has the air of a miniature Alpine road. There is a small pull-off at the overlook, where you can park and look down at the river and the forested hills beyond.
Read the complete Hawk’s Nest cliff road write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
46 km in you reach Hawk’s Nest cliff road. Next is Delaware River view.
The Delaware is one of the quiet success stories of American rivers. From its sources in the Catskills it runs for hundreds of miles to the sea at Delaware Bay, and for most of that length it is free-flowing, without a major dam on its main stem, which makes it the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi. The stretch here, part of the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River, a unit of the national park system, runs through a forested valley of low ridges and small farms, with the river broad and green in summer and grey and icy in winter. The pull-off here gives a view down onto the water, with a bridge or two and the hills beyond.
Read the complete Delaware River view write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Delaware River view, late in the day. Next is Back to Middletown.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Middletown fuel gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Back to Middletown. That is the ride.
This Port Jervis food stop → Hawk’s Nest cliff road stretch is for rhythm and scenery. Keep your head up, let the view breathe, and resist turning every open bend into a target. Stop once properly rather than half-stopping everywhere.
Use Hawk’s Nest cliff road → Delaware River view as clean positioning. Keep it tidy, ignore impatient traffic and save the enthusiasm for the good road ahead. The value here is not drama; it is arriving at the riding section with space, fuel and concentration intact.