Sunken Meadow State Park

 Looking east...

Traditionally Italian people say you should  spend Christmas with your family and Easter with whom you please.

In the last five or six years, living in Berlin and having there my "new" family, I was spending Easter - or at least Easter Monday - with them, which is actually nice and fun, because Ralph has a pretty large family too: with uncles and aunts, cousins, some of whom have kids as old as our kids; plus Ralph's grandma is still alive (103 years old and rather healthy), so there is a  four generation get together eating delicious homemade German Kuchen (lucky me).

Anyway, this year it was just the four of us, and we enjoyed the two beautiful sunny days to be outside and explore more of Long Island.

Since Carlotta was wishing so much to ride her bike, we needed a place which was not the usual Heritage Park in Mount Sinai and still bike friendly, so we headed to Sunken Meadow State Park, which has a 3/4 mile boardwalk wide enough to practice biking and still room for lot of people walking, jogging or pushing strollers. And for toddler running after bikes, of course.

Sunken Meadow State Park is one of the two end points of the Long Island Greenbelt trail, which on the south starts from Heckscher State Park.
This trail stretches for about 39 miles, and since I don't see myself covering it all, neither alone nor with kids aged 4 and 1, I will have to be contented with exploring part of it from time to time.
One of the most amazing things about Sunken Meadow is that it borders the Nissequogue River State Park, from which you can see the Nissequogue emptying into the Sound.

Not having being in this area before we chose to drive from our place west-bound on the Nesconset Highway and take then the route 25a, which is maybe the fastest but probably less scenic way to do it.
One of the surprisingly  nice places (for me, at least) we drove through was Kings Park; this is a city with flair and a number of old buildings that, to my disappointment seemed quite abandoned, especially the little shops in the city center. Not as abandoned as in Riverhead, but maybe with a similar fate of becoming a ghost town just because everybody is shopping at the nearby mall, leaving few reasons to maintain stores which don't sell as well.
Anyway, there is a very good bakery (Park Bakery) in Kings Park - nice breads, cookies, pastries - a joy for the eyes and not only!

With the weather getting so pleasant it is time to be outside  a bit more; even the rain isn't as annoying as it use to be, because, as Carlotta has taught me "April showers bring May flowers" and, talking about flowers and flora in general, I found this page, which is very interesting: maybe I can finally learn what trees I see in the neighborhood (on the street signs at least - Rocky Point has this funny feature of having streets named after trees and whenever I drove by Locust I got upset thinking it was an animal - see, no reason to be upset anymore).