The seedy, loud place where you overindulge your senses by night becomes a sleepy land of $1.99 breakfast specials at dawn. Bumping merrily over the boards is a simple, childlike pleasure. And the 4-mile round-trip helps assuage your guilt over last night's fudge and funnel cakes.

If you've already been there and done that (enough people do it that traffic jams are common from about 9:30 a.m. until the boardwalk closes to bikers at 11 a.m.), here's a new twist: Bike the length of the 5-mile island.

Off-road bike paths connect to the boardwalk at both ends, so you can cruise southward along the beach deep into Wildwood Crest and northward all the way to the seawall in North Wildwood.

The glory part? "It's all flat," says Ben Rose, a spokesman for the Greater Wildwoods Tourism Improvement and Development Authority.

If you don't have your own wheels, rental shops are situated at convenient intervals along the route. Most open at 6 a.m.

From a scenery standpoint, biking the Wildwoods isn't quite in the same league as cruising the byroads in Tuscany. Essentially, you have the flat, endless beach on one side and motel pools on the other.

But there are small, unexpected pleasures along the route.

At the southern entrance (at Rambler Road, across from the Oceanview Motel), a cheery sign welcomes riders to the Crest segment of the greater Wildwoods bike path. This south-of-the-boardwalk leg of the route features two public playgrounds, a library and a new, landscaped "walking park" (near the Port Royal Hotel) with exercise stations.

North of the boardwalk, the North Wildwood segment has wooden play structures at regular intervals, including one that's shaped like a train and another that's a replica of the Cape May ferry. The water view is especially pretty here because you can see the water across the unusually narrow beach.

The North Wildwood bike path also has an ocean-side change machine, for some reason, and handy Daily News honor boxes - in case those coins are burning a hole in your bike pants.

The whole-island route is marked in green on the Official Map of the Wildwoods that's printed inside the free "Love Those Wildwood Days!" pamphlet you see everywhere on the island.

Officially, the route also includes an on-road bike path that loops back around on the bay side of the island, for a 15-mile round-trip workout. But practically speaking, that's more than most infrequent riders can handle, says Don Zitto, owner of Crest Bike Rental. "They go to the end of the boardwalk and come back, and they've had it." *