the time it cost $100 to go to coney island... from brooklyn

I did some quick mental calculations. It was going to cost us over $100 to cycle from Brooklyn to Coney Island, New York using Citi Bike NYC, New York's new bike sharing program. Zander and I looked at each other and shrugged. "We're too close to turn back now." 

Zan and I spent the weekend in New York with friends to celebrate Mel's and my birthdays. We drove up on Thursday night and planned a grand Brooklyn takeover for Friday. We woke early and cemented our plan to find bagels (most important) and then rent bicycles.

Brooklyn to Coney Island, New York is one of the nation's most iconic urban bike rides. I read it on multiple websites, and the internet only tells the truth so I know that to be fact. After having done it, I can attest to its veracity, although I'll be honest - I don't have a lot of iconic urban bike rides to which to compare it. I do know that it's stunningly beautiful with views of the Manhattan skyline, Prospect Park (Brooklyn's Central Park), tree lined streets, diverse neighborhoods, a beach, and the famous Coney Island boardwalk. It's mostly flat, around 12-14 miles roundtrip, and whole lotta fun. 

As we walked out of Bergen Bagels, home of my new favorite New York bagels, I mapped our way to the nearest bike shop. It'd be a mile walk, and after spraining my ankle on a yoga hike (I'm still embarrassed about that), and failing to properly wrap or ice it for days, Zan was trying his best to limit how much I was walking. As we crossed the street, he pointed out Citi Bikes, the sister program to DC's BikeShare. I hemmed and hawed. This wasn't the plan. 

"Do they even have gears?" 

Zan checked. "Yes, they do." 

"Yeah but they're not meant for trails."

"We're in New York. Everything is paved," he countered.

"But they're way more expensive!" I saved my best argument for last. 

He leaned in to check the pricing. "A 24-hour pass is $10." 

A bicycle rental was $35 from the bike shop. 

And just like that, I was sold. The idea sounded great. As he inserted his credit card for our $20 ride out to Coney Island - for both of us - I read the fine print. The 24-hour pass is good for unlimited 30 minute rides. Every 30 minutes, we'd need to dock the bikes or pay late fees. 

"STOP DONT DO IT!" I animatedly yelled, my arms flailing, trying to pull him away from the machine. 

"Oooops," Zan said as his receipt popped out with codes to unlock the bikes. 

We paused, staring at each other. 

"Let's do it," I said with a shrug. "We'll find stations along the way. It'll be an adventure!" 

The full ride starts on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, allowing cyclists to see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, Governor's Island, and Manhattan behind you. We started closer to Prospect Park, about 2 miles into the ride. We breezed through the city streets, thankful for fairly consistent bike lanes. 

When we reached Prospect Park, we watched in awe as serious cyclists zoomed past us, bent in perfect posture over the handlebars. Runners kept pace on the trail by the road or on the paved lane itself. The tree-lined lane with large, manicured acres of green curved around a small pond on one side and a lake on the other. We stopped to take in the view and take a few photos. We heard music jingling from a carousel nearby.

Out of the Park, we swerved around a traffic circle onto Ocean Parkway, which took us over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, through a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood, down into an old part of Brooklyn with houses that looked out of place amongst the brownstones we'd seen where we started, and finally, when we could go no further, the ocean. 

But before we reached the ocean, people kept honking at us. Young men and old women and teenagers and everybody in between stopped us in their cars and on the streets to ask us, "Where'd you get those bikes?" About five blocks from Coney Island, we started to feel uneasy. More and more people were approaching us, so incredibly excited, about these bikes. I pulled out my phone and motioned Zander to stop.

We hadn't seen a station the entire way, but we figured - we're only 30 or 45 minutes over time, and the fees at that time range aren't too big, and we'll be able to re-dock them on Coney Island. I looked at the Citi Bike's website and found the station map. I scrolled... and scrolled some more. 

"It must not be loading right," I said to Zan, confused. "It's not showing any stations." 

I scrolled up all the way back to where we'd started. And there, a little dot appeared. We had rented bikes at the last station in Brooklyn. We would have to get back to where we started to dock the bikes. 

I looked at the time. We'd rented the bikes at 10:15, and it was now... 11:20. After the first 90 minutes, late fees cost $13 for every half hour. I did quick math and guessed that for both bikes would cost around $110 by the time we got back to a station. We were screwed. 

On the other hand, we were so close to Coney Island that it felt more foolish not to finish than to head straight back. So onward we went, cruising through the last five blocks until we hit the sand.

It was Zan's and my first time on Coney Island, and we enjoyed seeing it quiet, the rides closed down, out of season. Sunbathers still lined the sand and jet skis sprayed wake into the sunshine, and we shared an original Nathan's hot dog covered in chili and got it on our pants, and held hands and shared a kiss in front of the Ferris Wheel. 

And we did all that in five minutes because good God, we had to return these bikes. 

We pedaled as fast as we could, and Zander has thighs of steel from years of playing rugby and baseball and all of the sports in the world, and he lapped me 15 times in Prospect Park up a hill, and it felt like a race against the clock and like a scavenger hunt trying to find the closest station. When we docked the bikes, I breathed a giant sigh of relief and started laughing because the second Zan's bike clicked into place, he threw his fists in the air in triumph. 

It was the most expensive bike ride of our lives, but in a way that only some misadventures can be, it was totally and completely worth it. 

But please, don't rent Citi Bikes to go to Coney Island.

if you go...

check out ride brooklyn for bike rentals

distance: 12-15 miles roundtrip, depending on where you start

difficulty: 2/5 - mostly flat, going back up prospect park is the only real hill

directions! this detailed guide is great

i was robbed and pooped my pants in koh phi phi

You'll notice that this story is bereft of pictures. That's because my camera was stolen. Along with my passport, cash, credit cards, and my new friend's pants. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

I landed on the island of Patong, Thailand a few days after Christmas. I suffered 24 miserable hours in that squalid city. I had to search for Thai food amongst the tourist traps, and the best I found was in a food court in the basement of a shopping mall. I ordered pad kee mao, or drunken noodles, and a fruit smoothie. The noodles were bland, and I threw them out. I slurped down my smoothie - it was refreshing, and I was glad I'd ordered it.

I tried to find a spot on the beach to drop my blanket and then my jaw at the turquoise water, but before I had a chance to sit down, I was asked to leave: that area is for customers who want to rent a beach chair. I asked where I could go. The young Thai guy shrugged. The whole beach is for customers. 

I shopped for a while before trudging back to my dirty hostel room; I'd sprung for a single, private room, and it was as much a disappointment as the beach had been. I tried to fall asleep early - I had a 6am ferry the next morning. I fell asleep until midnight, when Patong becomes a city-wide rave and frat party and circus in one, and lay awake listening to drunk tourists dare each other to take a shot of this liquor or that. It's fortuitous I was already awake and that I had my own room because at 3am cramps gripped my insides and propelled me to the toilet with such force I hoped everything was still intact. I spent the next hours plopped on the toilet.

By 6am, I didn't care that I was exhausted and still sick. I was so excited to get off the damn island and on to Koh Phi Phi. I met a guy on the ferry; he was American and reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I'd finished it a few months prior and asked how he was enjoying it. We talked for the rest of the ferry ride, and he asked if I'd like to have dinner when we were settled on the island.

We meandered from one bar with Thai boxing to another with karaoke, and we drank too many cocktails and laughed especially hard at our jokes. We ignored a no-trespassing sign and hopped the adjacent fence onto a private beach that arched to the other side of the island. We took in the full moon, and ran our toes through the warm water. We had another drink at a closing bar, and I said, "Let's run into the water. Let's go for a swim." It was 4am, and he said yes, and so we shed our clothes - he stripped down to his boxer briefs, and I stripped to the bathing suit beneath my dress- and we piled our clothes, and my purse, and the contents of his pockets on the sand, and we ran screaming into the water.

We made out for a while - and he was the absolute worst kisser in the history of mankind, and all the booze in my system couldn't change that fact, and so I fibbed that I was cold, and let's head back to our hostels. We emerged from the beach, the moonlight illuminating our way to the pocket of sand where we'd stripped, but nothing was there but the indentation from what had been; we'd been robbed.

We searched for hours. Bar owners came down with flashlights to help us look. Our things were gone. We couldn't do anything until 8am when the police station opened. We trekked back across the island, him with his hands over his goods. Since he'd lost his key, and I had held onto mine, he stayed in my room. I offered him the only shorts that would fit: a pair of yellow boxers covered in smiling faces.

As I was dozing off, he reached a hand down my pajama pants. And then he said, "We can salvage some of this night" in a voice that tried to be sexy but was repelling and disgusting, and I nearly slapped him in the face but settled for his hand, and said, "Hell no."

Less than an hour later, I crawled out of bed, trying not to wake the other three sleeping guys in the room - did I mention I was in a shared, co-ed dorm room? And as I stepped down from the stairs on the bunk bed to the floor, cramps seized my stomach, and I ran to the bathroom, the shared bathroom, with 4 sleeping men in the same room. I closed the door, turned on the faucet to cover the sounds, and I finished off the toilet paper right as another round hit. What was I going to do without toilet paper? 

I turned on the shower. 

You do what you gotta do. 

After I showered, I quietly left the room and made my way to the police station. I filed a report - of course, they didn't know anything, and I dejectedly retreated back to the hostel, mentally making a plan of what to do next: get to a US embassy, see if I can get money back from the hostel or borrow money from someone else, renew my Japanese work visa; there were a million things to consider.

As I began climbing the granite stairs to the hostel, another waive of stomach cramps flooded my body, and my stomach flooded my pants. I stood shocked, my mouth open. I was standing nearly on top of an island, with the beach below me, four men in my room, and poop in my pants.

I feigned forgetting my key and having to go really bad to use the private bathroom in the hostel lobby, and I cleaned up as best I could. As I walked out, The Road Guy was walking down the street in nothing but those yellow boxers, and I thought, well, pooping my pants and being robbed and all, that sight makes my day. 

As I was packing my bags and preparing to beg someone to borrow money, the hostel owner came into my room and said, I have your bag up front. I quizzically looked at him, confused - how in the world did he know, and could it be my things? When he handed me my purse, I fought tears and hugged him with all my might, thanking him profusely.

"You're lucky," he said. "A fisherman found it thrown in the bushes. He's the only one on the island who speaks English, and he took it to the only American who works on the island. She found your picture ID and called around to find you. It's fate."

I hiked up the hill to The Road Guy's hostel, and I knocked on his door. I handed him back his shoes; his pants had been taken for good, along with my camera and cash. I stuck out my hand, and he shook it with his.

"This night will make one hell of a story," he said. "But I hope we never see each other again." I nodded my agreement, a tinge of laughter in both of our eyes.

I took one last look at him as I walked away and yelled back, "You can keep the boxers."