CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Leave the city behind and spend the day on roads with texture. Out of Kings Point and back again: 369 km, roughly 6 h 00 in the saddle. The stops in between: in New City, Scenic stretch in Fanwood and Manville. The climb of the day is in Montvale.
Next is Food stop in New City.
Food stop in New City is where this day stops to eat. Next is High point in Montvale.
This is where the road stops climbing. Next is Scenic stretch in Fanwood.
Fanwood is one of those small, tidy New Jersey boroughs built around a railway station, with a compact centre, tree-lined streets and commuters heading for Manhattan each morning. On its own it offers little for a rider beyond a quiet road and a coffee, but its position at the foot of the Watchung Mountains makes it a useful starting point.
Read the complete Scenic stretch in Fanwood write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Scenic stretch in Fanwood, about halfway. Next is New York / Hudson Valley rides return.
Manville takes its name from a factory. In the early twentieth century, the Johns-Manville company built a huge plant here in central New Jersey, producing asbestos building materials, and a town grew around it to house the workers, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. The plant closed in the 1980s after asbestos was found to be deadly, and the company was bankrupted by lawsuits. Today Manville is a modest working-class borough of small houses and shops, sitting where the Raritan and Millstone rivers meet.
Read the complete Near Manville, on the way back write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
New York / Hudson Valley rides return sits at 206 km, about halfway. Next is Photo stop near Little Silver.
Little Silver occupies a neck of land between two tidal rivers, the Navesink and the Shrewsbury, in the comfortable heart of Monmouth County. It is an old place by American standards, settled in the seventeenth century, and the river shores around it are lined with marinas, big houses and marshes where ospreys nest on platforms in summer. Red Bank, next door, is a lively small town with theatres and restaurants, and it was the birthplace of the jazz bandleader Count Basie, whose name is on the town's grand old theatre.
Read the complete Photo stop near Little Silver write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Photo stop near Little Silver comes up about 245 km into the recorded legs. Next is Hawk’s Nest and Upper Delaware checkpoint 8.
You finish this ride in the flat, busy heart of Bergen County, New Jersey, between Ridgefield, Moonachie and Little Ferry, only a few miles across the Hudson from Manhattan. The landscape is the Meadowlands, a huge tidal wetland along the Hackensack River that was for decades a dumping ground for trash and industry and has slowly been cleaned up. Today it is a strange mix: warehouses, highways, rail yards and an airport, alongside reed beds, mud flats and channels full of herons, egrets and ospreys.
Read the complete Near Ridgefield write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Hawk’s Nest and Upper Delaware checkpoint 8 closes the day. Next is Back to Hawk’s Nest.
Hawk's Nest, the cliff road along the Delaware, is a long way from here. In the early twentieth century this part of the island was the Gold Coast, where the families of bankers and industrialists built mansions with lawns that ran down to the shore, and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived at Great Neck in the 1920s and drew on the area for the world of Gatsby, with its East Egg and West Egg.
Read the complete Hawk’s Nest write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Back to Hawk’s Nest. That is the ride.
Food stop in New City → High point in Montvale is the logistics leg. Watch junctions, villages and speed changes, then let the roadbook do its job: move you out of the clutter without spending your best attention too early.
High point in Montvale → Scenic stretch in Fanwood rides best with patience. Coastal roads change character with wind and visitors; keep overtakes boring and take the photo from a proper stop.
Scenic stretch in Fanwood → Near Manville, on the way back is the reward section in New York. Look through the bends, use legal pull-offs for photos and keep a little margin for tractors, cyclists and damp shade. The best ride here is smooth, not noisy.
Photo stop near Little Silver → Near Ridgefield can flow quickly, but only if you keep village limits and junction sightlines sacred. Fast connectors are where rides get untidy when fatigue creeps in.