Trip 46 — Long Island Walk

Day 5: Stony Brook to Wading River
Sunday, 9 November 2025

Today: 38294 steps/30.36 km/18.86 mi/5h 17m
Total: 210900 steps/164.24 km/102.05 mi/29h 18m

"Local" may be the most unnecessarily used word on the news. Pretty much every story involving an ambulance contains a comment that the victim was rushed to a local hospital. Whenever I hear that, I think, "Well, wasn't that keen thinking, taking them someplace nearby?"

So you can imagine my raised eyebrow (and I burn a lot of calories raising it) when News 12 advised me to "stay tuned to the latest hyperlocal weather updates." Greek prefixes promise a scientific precision. Are they providing the forecast for the rightmost pillar at the entrance to the Three Village Inn? Even "local" isn't needed here: People watching News 12 Long Island aren't trying to get the forecast for Omaha.

But I must heed the forecast itself and not dwell on the diction. It's foggy now, and it's going to rain starting at around noon. I've woken up early, and, much as I'd love to sit in front of the fire in the lobby, I depart at 8:30.

The sky doesn't match the forecast. There's no fog; it's the kind of clear, blue morning where you can't imagine that it will ever rain again. And it's warm, already in the upper 50s. I need just a T-shirt on top.

I curl around through a hilly, residential neighborhood and past a produce stand abundant with pumpkins, and after 40 minutes I'm at the start of the greenway that runs between Setauket and Port Jefferson. It's a downhill slope, great for eastbound bikers, and I have the company of joggers, walkers, and pet dogs. One guy is walking backwards, facing me but going in the same direction as I.

The greenway runs through a neighborhood cutely named for little mammals: Lynx Lane, Bobcat Lane, Ferret Lane, Badger Lane. Where it crosses the busier roads, a sensor makes a beeping sound and causes warning lights to flash. This is embarrassing. I don't want my presence announced with music and strobes, unless I'm on a stage and there's a piano. Drivers should always be on the lookout and not reliant on flashing lights to tell them that there's a human being or a dog or a deer. Otherwise it's only a matter of time before a killer gets acquitted by claiming that the warning lights didn't go on.

In Port Jefferson, I take Hallock Avenue for a couple of kilometers, past the Port Jefferson rail yard, and then pick up the North Shore Rail Trail. The trail opened three years ago and follows the line taken by the Long Island Rail Road between Port Jefferson and Wading River, which closed in 1938. It's got pristine mileage markers painted in white on the ground, counting off every quarter-mile from 0.00 to 10.50.

The clouds have come in, but it's not raining yet. The leaves here are darker, reddish-brown; perhaps that's a function of my being farther east, or perhaps a couple of days made a difference in their progress. A few spotted lanternflies are on the ground. Normally I'd step on them, as they're an invasive species, but if they've hung on this long in the season, they're not likely to do much damage.

The trail follows a mostly straight trajectory. After a couple of kilometers, at Peachtree Lane, there's a memorial in the form of about 30 candles, a cross made of sticks, and a teddy bear, but I find no information about the victim.

There's a break in the trail at Rocky Point, where a replica of the old station building now serves as a museum honoring the veterans of Suffolk County and beyond. A few doors down Broadway, I step into the Rocky Point Ale House.

The only customers are a few men scattered along the bar; the jokesters are at the end nearest the window. I sit in the middle. To my right, a man is finishing a plate of chicken wings. He has an empty shot cup and three plastic cups of water in front of him.

The menu is vaguely Central European. Apart from the usual quesadillas and sandwiches, there are pierogi, Bavarian pretzels and burgers, and a special of Hungarian goulash. Right on theme, one TV screen is showing the end of an American football game being played in Berlin.

At the jokester end, somebody wants to play the Quick Draw lottery game, which has a drawing every few minutes, but it's under maintenance until two o'clock.

"If you want," his friend says, "you can give me twenty dollars and I'll give you twelve dollars back."

I get zucchini sticks and the goulash. It's soupy but tasty.

It's time for the Jets and Giants games. "I'm sorry, can you change the channel?" one of the jokesters calls out. "I want to watch Lifetime."

"There's a table across the street," his friend answers.

The place starts to fill up with people ordering chicken wings and buckets of beer. There's some paperwork going on at a high-top, maybe betting on the games. Except for me, everyone knows everyone else. One woman — the only one out of 27 customers by the time I leave — is friends with the bartender.

"I'm pretty hung over," the bartender tells her in her musical Long Island drawl. "When I got here, I thought, boy, I have a lot of energy. But that faded fast."

Her state doesn't affect her ability to handle an increasingly noisy crowd of sports fans, however. She's friendly and she keeps my Coke glass (it's a real glass this time) filled.

There's a hint of a drizzle when I leave, but no more than that as I proceed along the last third of the trail. Someone has set up a children's library with a wooden bench, and there's a chalk drawing of a whale on the ground. Farther along, an information board shows the location of the former Shoreham station, which had a luggage chute along its 15 stairs to the platform. Nearby is a science center and museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla, who had a laboratory here.

As I complete the trail, the rain starts to pick up, and I hurry the last two kilometers to the Inn and Spa at East Wind. Like the Three Village Inn, it's a place for weddings, and the swirly carpet patterns, long hallways, and gilded mirrors give country-club vibes. The person checking in before me is wearing a boutonniere, and a woman is escorting a couple around the place as they consider it for their big day. "Is it stressing you out?" she asks them.

If it weren't raining, I might visit the fruit stand down the road or explore the East Wind shopping area. Instead I try to figure out how to get the local CBS channel so I can watch tonight's "60 Minutes." But all they have is Samsung TV's generic channels, and while there's a CBS News option, the most recent episode is last week's laughable interview with the president. The "ts-ts-ts-ts" sound I make as I shake my head, a smack of disapproval that only my grandmother could perform accurately, is a human variation on the ticking clock at the beginning of the show.

The rain stops, and I walk over to the shopping center. Most of it is closed for the day, including the carousel, and the Italian restaurant is more than I want to spend. I come back to the bar where I'm staying, and I'm pleased to see $7 football-day specials such as baked clams and mussels.

Two men sit down next to me. One is a bartender in Riverhead, coming to check out the scene in Wading River. He looks to be about 18 years old, and he and my bartender talk about their Polish ancestry and discuss the proper Shirley Temple recipe. She also tells him about a brawl at a wedding during the past week, involving the bride's aunt and the groom's sister-in-lsw, or some such thing. Maybe the place isn't as sterile as it seemed.

Go on to day 6