Martha's Vineyard story

Here's a story from 1977 when I was living in Northern Virginia. It happened that one of my two best friends was living and working in Washington D.C. and we often got together to do things. One summer, we decided to make a trip to Martha's Vineyard for a short camping trip. While we drove my car there (and took it to the island on the ferry), we wanted to bike around the island. So, we got to the campsite (somewhere near the red circle labeled '1' on the map to the right), set up our tent and set out for one of the lighthouses taking the State Road (and its south branch named S Rd on the map). Gay Head Lighthouse - located, of course, at Gay Head - on the south-western tip of the island and named for the brightly colored clay cliffs there) was about 15 - 20 miles from our campsite. It's circled in red and labeled '2' on the map. It didn't take long to get there and we spent a long time investigating the lighthouse and then climbing down the cliffs to the beach. It was beautiful and we spent more time there than we had planned. It was getting late so we looked for a shorter way back. I had a pretty large scale map that seemed to show a shorter way along the western side of the island. But when we got to where we assumed a bridge would be across a small harbor (the red circle labeled '3' on the map), there was no way to get across. After searching for a way across, we finally decided we'd have to go back the way we came (all the way back to the red circle labeled '2' because we didn't trust the map anymore). We had to backtrack about 2 - 3 miles and by the time we got back to the lighthouse, it was dusk. We'd have to move fast but we missed a few turns on the way back and, with about 10 miles to go, it was completely dark. We didn't have lights on our bicycles and didn't even have flashlights with us. So, we carefully rode along the light-less road going off onto the shoulder more times than we could count. The worst part, though, was when a car would come down the road. The headlights were so bright to our dilated eyes that they would blind us and we had no idea where the car was coming from and where the edge of the road was. We came close to being hit a number of times with people yelling and honking at us making us even more nervous. We ended up only making about 5 miles per hour because we walked as much as we rode and that part of the trip took us about 2 hours. It seemed longer than that. We were completely exhausted when we finally got back to our campsite and had to rest for a long time before driving off for a much anticipated meal at a nice restaurant. I've never gone on a bike ride without some sort of light since.