NEW YORK -- Next to walking, the best way to really see New York City is on two wheels.
If you've already shopped Fifth Avenue, checked out Rockefeller Center and seen the new Times Square, think about boarding a bicycle to visit other parts of town.Also, if you get bored with big buildings and dodging traffic, you can ride a few leisurely miles in Central Park or take off across the George Washington Bridge and head north into country terrain.
Serious cyclists also might want to check out some of the major bike events in and around the city.
Each May there's the Five Boro Bike Tour starting at Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan, and going up the island over to the Bronx, down through Queens and Brooklyn, and over the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island. In 42 mostly flat miles with about 30,000 fellow cyclists, you can see city streets and parks through a variety of neighborhoods, with streets and bridges closed to other traffic.
Coming up on June 10 is the New York to the Hamptons challenge, a 100-mile ride to Long Island to benefit AIDS research. Then there's the Escape from New York Century that winds through the city on Sept. 23.
If you just want to set out on your own to explore the city, there's lots to see in the Big Apple. But be warned: City traffic can be hazardous to your health.
Visitors staying in a midtown hotel can walk up the east side of Central Park and just north of 72nd Street there is a place to rent bikes. (The park is closed to cars on weekends and holidays and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 7 p.m to 10 p.m. on weekdays.)
By far the best time to see the city on a bike is on the weekend, since the traffic is light.
Any direction is the right one. But if you're starting in midtown, you need to have an idea of the distance you want to travel and the special things you want to see.
Assuming you are starting in Manhattan, 20 miles could mean a ride around the island (do the northern part first to get the hills out of the way). One way to do this would be to ride up the west side. Get onto Riverside Drive at 72nd Street, take that up to 165th St., and go up the hill to Fort Washington Street. You'll see a lot of bikes at this turn and most are heading to the hard-to-find bike path across the George Washington Bridge. You might want to ride across and check out the view along the Palisades.
If you want to keep the ride urban, go past the George Washington Bridge into Fort Tyron Park, ride around and start heading south, drifting eastward as you go through Harlem and the Upper East Side.
Downtown, you can spin through the Lower East Side, Soho and into the deserted financial district to Battery Park, where you have a good view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Then turn north and head through Tribeca, Greenwich Village and Chelsea back to midtown.
This is a good way to take in a lot of the city, get a sense of its history and architecture and how neighborhoods blend together. Give yourself some time to stop and look around.
Another good 20-mile ride is a lap around Central Park before heading southeast to the Brooklyn Bridge, where you enter the walkway across the street from City Hall. The view of the New York harbor is superb from the bridge. Once in Brooklyn, head over to Prospect Park. A lap there, a trip back across the bridge, a turn down to the Battery, a ride back up along the West Side, and you've covered a lot of ground.
From Prospect Park you can also keep on going down through the Midwood section to Coney Island and ride along the boardwalk.
An even more ambitious trip is to take Flatbush Avenue across Brooklyn to the Rockaways. From there you can drive through this seaside section and cross back to Queens, heading north and then West to take the 59th Street Bridge back into Manhattan. This is a great ride, but a serious one. You'll want to map it out carefully.
Web sites like Mapquest can help you map a route.
If you get worn out, you can always take a subway back. So bring a subway map as well a street map with you if are heading out exploring. Suburban transportation systems are not as bike-friendly, and without a pass you can't bring a bike onto a train, for instance.
If you ride for exercise, or are traveling for fun, peddling around New York City will give you a good way to take in a lot of the variety the city has to offer.