We’d been waiting in the raucous Spirit Airlines terminal at La Guardia for almost 8 hours when we realized our flight was finally going to be cancelled. We’d kept ourselves busy over the past few hours by watching nature videos via iPhone and glaring at the rude businessmen across from us who refused to move their trench coats so that old ladies could sit down.

The plan had been in place for months: a 6-day Labor Day hiking extravaganza in the Sierras – a cross-country mountain escape. We'd bought plane tickets, squirreled away vacation days, mapped routes, researched and purchased hiking boots and poles, and in the days leading up to take-off, we'd bought and packed about 30 lbs of dried food.

Buoyed by our desperate hopes for fleeing the city, we endured hours of flight delays and denial, until finally our flight was cancelled at 11pm, due to thunderstorms in our connecting city, Detroit.

Ryan and I learned an important lesson that night: Never. Fly. Spirit. Airlines.

Then we fell into a deep depression. In the wake of the loss of our trip, life got a little less shiny. On top of that, it was too expensive to get out of the city for the weekend - we tried trains, buses, rental cars, and planes, but the New York holiday rush had us beat.

The only option we had was to get back in the saddle and pedal our way to Labor Day freedom.

And so the Catskills ride was born. Or, cobbled together.

Just about 150 miles outside of the city, the Catskills are far enough to seem like a destination, but close enough to reach by bike. We decided to pad the schedule with some rest days - this was meant to be an adventure AND vacation, after all - and so we worked a couple of legs on the train into the route.

We planned to bike the familiar 50-mile route to Croton, stealth camp in the woods overnight, take the morning train to Poughkeepsie, ride 50 miles to the Catskills, camp, tube, relax, ride around, then bike back to Poughkeepsie and take the train back into Penn Station.

The Croton route has become one of our favorites over the years, as the majority of the route runs over the North-South County Trailway, a well-maintained rail trail - smooth pavement for miles, no traffic, hard to get lost. After a backwoods night in the hammocks and a quick train ride, we launched from the train station in Poughkeepsie and were delighted to find that our venture into the Catskills followed a similar rail trail. The Hudson Valley rail trail winds from the expansively vista’d Walkway over the Hudson, through New Paltz and the backwoods of the Black Creek Wetlands complex, and into Ulster County via the Ashokan Reservoir.

Along the muddy wetlands trail, we stopped to help a fellow two-wheeled couple fix a flat. Batting vicious mosquito clouds, they told us about an air-conditioned cave off the trail 200 yards ahead. Air conditioned cave?!? Sure enough, as we rode up to a wide-mouthed cavern next to the trail, we felt a blast of cold air, as if someone had opened a freezer door.

By the time we spotted Ashokan Reservoir in the distance, I had a permanent sports bra tan emblazoned across my shoulder blades, and we’d been riding for about 6 hours. The 12-mile wide, man-made watershed was created to provide water to New York City. So much water and we’d run out of anything to drink, with only 15 miles to go. Ryan busted out the water filter and we drank straight from the source, stumbling on an elderly couple with lawn chairs in tow, settling into their secret spot for the 4th of July fireworks.

One hour of daylight left and the bikes coasted into Phoenicia. The hammock-worthy state forest land we’d identified on the map turned out to be up a rather steep and overgrown hike, strewn with fist-sized rocks and thorny bushes. Thoroughly hangry and exhausted by that point, I definitely did NOT throw an unladylike and tearful tantrum while dragging my bike and panniers up that hill. I might have made Ryan carry my panniers.

But all was cured after a night spent in the hammocks. Strung up side-by-side over a pair of boulders, we slept off the fifty miles of the day far from the RVs lined up by the creek below.

We may have missed our flight to hike the Sierras, but pedaling our way into the Catskills to tube in a creek turned out to be a pretty great consolation prize.