This is no1 of the I love Long Island series. Don’t get me wrong. What I love is the water. When you get near it, and before you can see it, the light changes. Everything gets bigger, brightens. The smell in the air hints of salt. There’s a breeze. it’s a powerful, beautiful living thing, even when it’s treacherous.

So this is not about what I do love on LI. It’s about the oddities here. Yesterday we took our tandem bike to Heckscher State Park, where there are 4+ miles of bike trails, along the water and in the woods. We get in free, (because I am old), and ask the guy at the gate how to get to the trail. He says from any parking lot. So we drive around the park for 20 minutes, spying the bike trail every so often, but only finding parking lots gated off to cars. The beach area had a huge lot, closed, with big signs posted No Swimming. huh?

We finally find the one lot that is open, park beside the other 4 cars in it and get on the bike. The trail is supposed to be a loop, or at least that’s what it looks like on the map, but after about 25 minutes we rode right out of the park and couldn’t figure out where we were. That said, it is a nice ride.

There’s something haphazard and ill thought out on LI. It’s how it was developed, greedily and with no plan, after WWII. People settled for less than it could have been. They still are.