Greg & Camille Go Bike

The weather was awful in the morning with both rain and high winds. We had an appointment with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to be shuttled across at 1 PM, but given the weather, we weren't excited to rush for that deadline. We called and rescheduled for 3:30 PM instead. We spent the morning indoors, snacking, relaxing and enjoying some computer time.

The rain stopped a bit earlier than expected and we set out around 11 am. We took a quick detour down by the water as we hadn't seen much of the town the night before (it was very dark). There were 44 miles to the bridge-tunnel and we made pretty quick work of them. The character of the ride was pretty similar to the previous day, mostly travelling on lightly trafficked rural roads. The last 6 miles or so was on a new rail trail. It was nice to be off-road, but there was a fair amount of noise pollution from route 13 which ran parallel.

The southern end of Cape Charles spits you out at the Chesapeake Bay where the only way across is by motor vehicle. Fortunately, Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel police will actually escort you across the water, aka putting your bikes in the back of their truck. We got to the Visitor Center around 3 PM where an unpaved woodsy nature trail led us to… a fence. We could see the toll booths and building on the other side where we were supposed to meet our shuttle, but there wasn’t a clear way in. Until we looked at the fence and saw the door was unlocked. Bingo.

We each hopped into a different vehicle. Greg went in the truck with the bikes and Camille in the SUV with the Lieutenant. The officer driving the truck was an avid motorcyclist and spent the ride chatting about some of his favorite rides. He loves biking in West Virginia and really enjoyed doing the Blue Ridge Parkway. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Camille heard some dinging in her car; the seatbelt light was flashing on the dashboard. All she’ll say is that her seatbelt was already buckled and no other seatbelts got buckled the rest of the ride. Oh by the way, the bumper on that car read, “Click it or ticket!”

After crossing, we stopped for groceries before following some nice multi-use paths to our camp site in First Landing State Park. It was really interesting to see how the paths went through urban areas and then abruptly turned into heavily wooded parkland.

As we checked in to our campsite, the attendant seemed pretty excited that we'd arrived by bike. She told us that she doesn't know of anyone else arriving by bike (regardless the distance). We were very surprised to hear this information given how accessible the park seems to be. We set up camp, cleaned up and ate dinner. There was a moderately trafficked local highway close to the campground, so we could hear cars zipping past all night.