Orient Point

I’m on vacation from my summer in Pittsburgh, so I’m staying at my grandma’s house in Shelter Island, an island in between the two forks of Long Island. I’m here long enough that I felt it was reasonable to bring my bike out from college, so I thought I’d make use of it and go on a few rides. My grandma had told me of a ride she did in her youth to the tip of Long Island’s North Fork at Orient Point, and I thought it would be nice as a shorter trip.

I set off from home around noon, and spent the first few miles on Shelter Island getting to the North Ferry. Shelter Island is mainly accessible by ferries between it and Long Island’s North and South forks, so I had to use the North Ferry to get to the North Fork. A round trip is only $6 on a bike, which I don’t feel is too unreasonable for two ferry rides.

The North Ferry drops you off in Greenport, only two towns over from Orient. After a few minutes riding through Greenport’s downtown, I got on NY-25 as a nice main road with a decent shoulder that would take me the whole way to Orient. I hadn’t really internalized how much flatter Long Island is than Western Pennsylvania until I got on the main road; I think I averaged 3-4 miles per hour faster than usual on my bike being on a flat and paved road.

The state road unfortunately ends at the Orient Point Ferry about a mile away from the true tip of Long Island, so I had to lock my bike and hike the last mile to get to the very end. The hike was worth it; I got a nice view of the Long Island Sound and even got to see a lighthouse on nearby Plum Island!¹

The tip of the North Fork at Orient Point

From Orient Point, I took the same hiking-biking-ferry route I used to get to the point, finishing off a 29-mile out and back multimodal trip. I don’t usually post rides this short here, but I felt this one had a sufficiently cool destination that it was worth it to showcase.