Station to Station

So I had a little solo adventure this weekend.

Jen went up to her mother's in north Jersey on Saturday while I was racing the Mass Relay in Marysville. Sunday being Easter and the rest of her family getting together for it in north Jersey, I had to get myself up there. Driving the NJ Turnpike on a holiday sucks, so the plan was for me to drive to Princeton Junction (New Jersey Transit train station outside of Princeton, NJ), catch a train and meet Jen at Secaucus Junction.

Drive? Why drive when I can ride? At the very least we wouldn't have to drive back to Princeton Junction to get my car and drive separately home from there.

Jen was skeptical. I had some work to do if I was going to pull this off.

I started with Mapquest. I set up a route that didn't use highways or toll roads. Of course the first thing it did was direct me to route 1 through Trenton. There's three problems there. First is Trenton. I don't like driving through Trenton let alone ride a bike. The second was route 1. I don't like driving route 1 let alone ride a bike on it. The third is crossing the Delaware river. There's at least two bridges in Trenton that cross the Delaware. If I don't want to go through Trenton what's left?

Luckily this old dude named Washington had a similar problem crossing the Delaware river way back in his day. Apparently the place he used was so cool, they named it after him. That's right. There's a little town north of Trenton with a little bridge crossing the Delaware called Washington's Crossing. I added Washington's Crossing to my Mapquest request and got a new route.

Things were looking better. Mapquest said the route from my house to Princeton Junction would be seventy six miles. That's roughly five hours of riding. The train I needed to catch left at 1:20pm. If I left my house at 7am Sunday morning, that should be plenty of time. Next step was finding out NJTransit's policies on bikes. The bike policy seemed cool except for one caveat. If at any time a conductor decides there's no room for your bike, you must exit the train and leave it at the station. Hmmmm. Do I ride my nice shiny roadbike and risk having to lock it up because some nutty conductor thinks the train is full? Or do I ride the fixie and not worry about it getting stolen while it sits alone locked to a pole in the middle of Jersey on Easter? Fixie it is.

Jen was still skeptical.

Luckily I started planning this a week in advance. My next problem was I didn't know the roads. Other then knowing they weren't highways or toll roads, I had no idea how bike friendly they would be. I first turned to Google Earth to help me with this matter. Armed with the list of roads from Mapquest, I searched and scanned Google Earth to see if I could tell from their satellite imagery what kind of roads the route might be taking. Sure enough there were a few I knew by name I didn't want to ride and few others I could simply see were "too big" for bikes. Using the satellite imagery I picked out alternates around these roads and updated my Mapquest cue sheet.

Jen was starting to come around.

I think what nailed it home for her was the ultimate in navigation technology - GPS (though secretly now I was skeptical). With my GPS software, I preprogrammed the route into my device. Theoretically, all I should have to do is follow the route on my GPS, but I had never done this before and really had no idea how it would work (I've only ever tracked a route. I had never tried to follow one.). That didn't matter Jen had given me the green light.

Sunday morning I was up and out the door a little before 7:30am. It was a little chilly, but I pedaled on. The start of my route finding began in Norristown. I know how to get there, so no concerns yet, though I did take a more direct and normally busier route to get to Norristown. It was early Easter Sunday, things weren't so busy. Nine in the morning I arrive at the Norristown station with a little shy of thirty miles done so far.

Not trusting the GPS, I pull out my cue sheet (stuck in my sleeve for accessibility) and check the next three roads. I start riding north through Norristown. One block, two block, five blocks. Ten blocks. Where the hell is the turn? I keep riding. Big intersections, little intersections, Germantown Pike. Where the hell is the next road? Finally I come to E Township Line Rd and turn. I roll down a short while and make my next turn. I'm only three roads in and I'm frustrated. This sucks I'm not having fun. I decide to pull over and check the GPS. I turn it on, select the route and click the Navigate button. The screen switches over to the map view, zooms to my location and displays the route. I can see all the roads around me, an indicator for my position, the direction I'm heading, the route, my current speed and how much time it will take me to get to the next road at my current rate of speed. SWEET!!!! I put away the cue sheet and start following the LCD road. Roads and turns and rolling by. I'm not even paying attention to what road I'm on. As long as the indicator points in the right direction and follows the route, I'm happy.

It became a little game of sorts - watching the indicator move across the little screen and the time to the next road tick away. The miles too tick away. When I started in Norristown with the cue sheet it took forever for me to get from mile 30 to mile 35. With the GPS, I was rolling through the forty's and onto the fifty's, then something very bad happened. As I was nearing the fifty three mile mark "Arriving at Destination" started to blink on the bottom of the screen, then the time started counting backwards. Instead of how long till the next road, it was counting how long away from the last road I was going. The screen no longer displayed the route. The indicator was just following a road.

I rode back to the "destination" point. I clicked around in the GPS and quickly figured out the route came up short. For some reason when I entered it into the software, the entire route wasn't downloaded to the device. Wasn't a whole lot I could do now, so I pulled out the cue sheet. My worst fears were confirmed. I was at a four way intersection of sorts. One road I just came down. Two roads went off in directions that seemed somewhat level. The fourth road went straight up and it happened to be my road.

Up I climbed. It was kind of cool really as I was in quarry country. Huge slag piles and old rail lines crisscrossed the landscape till I got to the top where it was flat again. Again with the cue sheet I figured out the next three roads and pedaled on. A curious thing started to happen. I started going down. Not down huge long steep hills, but there was definitely a perceptible trend of down that continued for nearly eight miles. It ended here.


This is the Delaware river. I was oddly giddy at this point. It was only sixty-some miles from my house, but it was the first time I'd ever crossed a river into another state. Ok maybe I was a little dehydrated too. Within a few pedal strokes it was done. I was in New Jersey.

Since the Mapquest route had said the trip was around seventy six miles, I expected roughly fifteen miles left in the trip. Without the nifty aid of the GPS, I didn't have much to gauge how long that would take. Didn't really matter, just keep pedaling.

That pedaling finally brought me to Princeton, though not without climbing a nasty hill first. Tired from the hill and fighting to read my cue sheet on some shitty streets (million dollar homes on the shittiest roads I rode all day), I missed some turns. I was supposed to go through the middle of campus and take some pictures. Instead I ended up in downtown Princeton with all the shoppers and Sunday visitors. Instead of watching for my road, I'm watching for car doors and buses of tourists. I ride completely through town (which is downhill enough to suck going back) when I finally ask someone how to get to the train station. I turn around and follow his directions. Turns out they're wrong. Luckily I make my own wrong turn and end up in at least the right direction, but I'm running out of time.

I continue riding in what I think is the right direction. Finally I see signs for route 1. I know Princeton Junction is on the east side of route 1 and Princeton is on the west, but I don't know how far north or south of each other they are. I guess and head south parallel to route 1. I pass a bunch of cops arresting some guy. For some reason my sense of what the right direction was starts to feel wrong. For shits and giggles I check the GPS. There's enough of a map on it that I can get a little idea of the surrounding roads. Immediately I can see south along route 1 is not the right way. I turn around (again) and head for the cops. I roll up to the least engaged looking one and quickly ask for directions. Turns out my original direction was correct and Princeton and Princeton Junction are actually parallel to each other with route 1 running directly between. I'm still running out of time.

With a final sprint, I make it to the station.


I had enough time to buy my ticket, change clothes and call Jen to tell her I made it. The trip was 82 miles and 5 hours of riding. I don't know what the train ride distance was, but it took a little over an hour. After sitting all the time on the bike, I had no issues with standing on the train.

Jen picked me up in Secaucus, I grabbed a shower at her aunt's and we had dinner at her grandmothers. It was all very nice and very tasty. My legs were definitely sore, so I made sure I had plenty of Easter ham to pack in the protein.

Regardless of every one's skepticism, it turned out to be a really nice ride. All of the roads were bike worthy and enjoyable. In fact, I'll probably do it again next month when we go to visit friends in Princeton. At least then I could ride the roadbike, but what's the fun in that?

-b