Day 46 West Orange, NJ

June 9, 2019

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Today was, by far, the most urban ride we've had on this trip. I'm glad it was Sunday. I'm sure a weekday would have been much worse. We saw a wide range of towns and economic conditions. We went through gritty, impoverished places with closed factories and very poor housing, some average middle class towns that seemed full of regular working people and then a couple of towns which appeared quite wealthy.

We left North Brunswick and rode to New Brunswick, the home of Rutgers University. We saw a lot of that gritty poverty on the way.

This is a closed factory new New Brunswick. I didn't take pictures of the sad looking neighborhoods.

The part of the Rutgers campus we saw was nice. They know how to do a bike lane! We were on bike paths until we got north of the campus.

The towns got a little nicer as we went north. We went through Piscataway, Plainfield, Scotch Plains and Westfield.

We stopped at a convenience store in Scotch Plains and talked to several very nice people. This is Tommy and his son Gabe.

It's really fun to talk to people who get so enthusiastic about what we're doing.

Just after leaving the store, we saw a lot for sale.

I was honestly shocked at the price. Can $350,OOO.OO really be right for this lot?

A few mile north, we rode through Westfield. There were many large homes on beautifully landscaped lots.

We rode through Echo Lake Park.

Then we went through Springfield, Maplewood and the Oranges. We visited the Thomas Edison Historic Park.

This was the "R&D" building on the grounds of Edison's huge manufacturing facility in West Orange. It contained the research labs, engineering, design and drafting departments. Most of it is preserved as it was in the early 1900's.

Fun discovery - this statue of Edison, we learned from the sign, was sculpted by Alan Cottrill of Zanesville, Ohio, Kerry's hometown. His cousin used to date the sculptor.

Leaving the Edison park, it was only 2.1 miles to our hotel, but 1 mile of it had a 400 foot elevation gain. We were able to pedal most of it, but we did use "four on the floor" for about a quarter of a mile where the grade got over 11%. We have more climbing to look forward to in the next few days, so this was good practice!

Today's ride: 36 miles (58 km)
Total: 1,783 miles (2,869 km)

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RAY MURTAUGHThe Philly Bike Club does a ride from Philly to Brooklyn every year. I have done it (sometimes with Nancy on a tandem) many times. The route goes through Echo Lake Park.
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5 years ago

Keith A. SpanglerClimb on my friends
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5 years ago