Category Archives: Travel

In summary: New York City had a life of it’s own in my head. In early August, I visited there for the first time. On the first afternoon we visited Central Park and were there for hours, despite the jet lag. We started our first full day with a tour of the Intrepid and the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Next was the full cruise (two and a half hours plus) around Manhattan – south down the Hudson River and into the Upper Harbor off the tip of Manhattan and up the East River under the “BMW” bridges.

When last we saw our intrepid heroes (and a few hundred of their fellow tourists) we had passed under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and were approaching the Williamsburg Bridge. Here we’re just getting ready to go under, with mid-town Manhattan off in the distance.

The mid-town Manhattan skyline is dominated by the Empire State Building (at the left) but it’s getting more and more competition.

High-rise apartment buildings, such as Waterside Plaza, line the East River. I didn’t do any research, but my guess would be that these apartments are cheaper than Central Park South, but still far more expensive than Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Just south of Roosevelt Island is this iconic structure, the United Nations Headquarters. (The tall black tower on the right is a dark and evil place where a horrible monster lurks – we will not speak of it further.)

We wanted to go visit the UN, but it seems that’s one of the places where you need to book a tour several weeks in advance. We didn’t. Live and learn, something for the next trip.

Manhattan Island has some of the highest real estate values in the world. One consequence of this is things like this, where FDR Drive travels along the east shoreline of Manhattan. I don’t know if these buildings were there first (at the end of East 56th Street) and FDR Drive got built underneath them, or if FDR Drive was there first and the buildings got built over them. But for about five blocks here, the two overlap, at least on the vertical axis.

The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge is the one that we used to first enter Manhattan when we arrived and it seemed to be the one we used the most getting onto and off of the island. At its west end it empties right onto 59th Street or 60th Street and we were staying on 59th Street (which turns into Central Park South), so that might have something to do with it.

I also think one of the reasons I kept noticing was the Roosevelt Island Tram structure and wires passing above. Another thing we didn’t do and a place we didn’t get to on this trip.

The quantity and density of high-rise apartments along the East River is truly impressive. I’m sure that there are places such as Hong Kong and Tokyo that are even more crowded – but there aren’t many such places.

Just north of Roosevelt Island, the East River (which you will recall is not really a river, but actually a navigable tidal estuary) is joined by the Harlem River. Guess what? The Harlem River isn’t a river either, but a combination of a ship canal, another tidal estuary and a small creek. It’s all been dredged and rebuilt and widened and re-directed several times over the past three hundred years or so, so now it’s all just referred to as the Harlem River. When the Harlem River and the East River come together there can be some serious tides and tidal currents.

On Manhattan at that point you can just barely see Gracie Mansion through the trees. It’s the official residence of the Mayor of New York.

Next, we head up the Harlem River.

I’ve explained how New York City had a life of it’s own in my head. In early August, I visited there for the first time. After my first NYC taxi cab ride, we hit Central Park and were there for hours, despite the jet lag. After a good night’s sleep, we started our first full day in the city with a tour of the Intrepid and the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Next on the agenda was the full cruise (two and a half hours plus) around Manhattan. It’s an excellent way to get the big picture in one swell foop. We went south down the Hudson River and out into the Upper Harbor off the tip of Manhattan.

Coming out of the Upper Harbor on the east side of Manhattan, the river is dominated by the Brooklyn Bridge, crossing the East River.

Except that the East River isn’t a river, technically. It’s a salt-water estuary, with the Harlem River flowing into it at the north end of Manhattan. I guess that “East Salt-Water Estuary” didn’t have the same ring to it.

The architecture of New York City is endlessly variable and entertaining.

Old and new, side by side, tall buildings and tall ships. The Peking will be leaving New York City next year, so look at her while you can!

I found myself loving the Brooklyn Bridge much more than I thought I would. (There were a LOT of things about New York City that fell into this category!) Much, much more from it later.

This is a pretty great view of the Bridge – there are better to be had by other means of transport.

The Manhattan Bridge is just upriver of the Brooklyn Bridge. (Can it be “upriver” if there’s no river?)

Looking ahead is the Williamsburg Bridge. We were taught to remember them as the “B-M-W” Bridges – Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg.

Looking back at the Manhattan Bridge, the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan make one of the world’s most iconic skylines.

With the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges marking the lower end of the East River, we head north. Click on that photo to blow it up big and tell me that’s not a great place!

Looking through pictures of past October 1st, I see where we’ve had at least one fun road trip on this weekend.

A pity that, while **I** know that you have to turn off the flash before shooting out of a window at night to see what’s outside, my little point-and-shoot camera that night did not!

Good thing there wasn’t something amazing, unforgettable, bizarre, and fleeting outside the window, like an alien spaceship landing, a mermaid riding a flying unicorn, or a non-disgusting Presidential candidate!

I’ve explained how New York City had a life of it’s own in my head. In early August, I visited there for the first time. After my first NYC taxi cab ride, we hit Central Park and were there for hours, despite the jet lag. After a good night’s sleep, we started our first full day in the city with a tour of the Intrepid and the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Next on the agenda was the full cruise (two and a half hours plus) around Manhattan. It’s an excellent way to get the big picture in one swell foop.

Pulling away from the dock you get a great view of the Intrepid at the next dock. (Enterprise is safely tucked away in that white building that’s on the far left side of the flight deck.)

If you didn’t realize that New York City was and still is a major United States seaport, this trip will quickly correct that. As we headed south on the Hudson River it was wall-to-wall docks.

On the other hand, docks servicing shipping container ships and oil tankers and so on tend to be smelly and dirty and no one wants that just across the street from the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The tankers and freighters load and unload elsewhere these days, which leaves the docks open for use by the mega-rich for their yachts. The piers become prime real estate to be used in some creative ways – this one is enclosed in gigantic nets and is a golf driving range.

Oh, and of course, we found the Empire State Building there in mid-town. More of that when we get there. (Be patient, it’s going to take a couple of months. I took a LOT of pictures and we had many exciting adventures.)

About fifteen minutes into the cruise we start to approach Lower Manhattan. The One World Trade Center Tower dominates the skyline. As for the weather, it stayed squally and damp, but not raining hard after we left Intrepid. Just enough to have me making sure that I kept all of the cameras in ziplock freezer bags to stay dry when I wasn’t using them.

The design is spectacular with the opposing triangular faces all the way around. It’s 1,776 feet tall at the top of the spire. (They don’t do “subtle” real well in New York.)

Passing by the southern tip of Manhattan, the cruise heads out into the Upper Bay.

Looking to the south, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge appeared out of the haze. I also found there to be a lot more ship traffic out in the bay than I had expected. I’m not sure why – perhaps it’s that here off the coast of Southern California you get the occasional mega-huge cruise ship but not much more. There are often dozens of freighters at anchor waiting their turn to unload, but they move in and out in a stately way, lumbering into port from Santa Monica Bay.

New York Harbor was bustling! There were some big ships moving around out there, many pushing barges.

Of course, there was a steady stream of these out there, shuttling folks to and from a couple of famous islands out in the harbor. We got a decent view as we trundled past, but I’ll save the pictures for when we get to our trip out there on the following day.

Suffice it to say that it’s not just any old monument. I was surprised at how much I was affected by seeing her in person.

We paused for some nice distant views of Manhattan, then turned back to go up the far side, over on the right. The bit of land over on the far right is Brooklyn, and just above the barge you can see a bridge that some guy kept trying to sell me. (I didn’t buy it. He wanted a cash only deal.)

I’ve explained how New York City had a life of it’s own in my head. In early August, I visited there for the first time. After my first NYC taxi cab ride, we hit Central Park.

Central Park is wonderful! Starting from Central Park South where we were staying for the week, I went around The Pond, Sheep Meadow, and Strawberry Fields.

There I found The Lake, and a lovely place it was. Despite the distant honking of horns, the bicyclists and joggers whizzing by, and the thousands of other people enjoying the park, I found it easy to almost believe that I wasn’t in the middle of one of the biggest and most crowded cities on the planet. With some views that minimized the number of skyscrapers to be seen peeking over the trees, you could almost forget.

Other views, not so much. but I did find it interesting to see the contrast between the mountains of glass and steel in the distance and the tranquility of the water and trees in the foreground. This was taken from the Oak Bridge at Bank Rock Bay, at the north end of The Lake, looking south toward the buildings along Central Park South and beyond.

I was pleased to see critters! There were always plenty of minnows to be seen in the shallows, and out from the shore I could occasionally see some pretty large bright orange fish lazing along. Probably some sort of koi, if I had to guess. Once I started looking, I found flotillas of hundreds of these turtles bobbing along.

Coming back down the east side of The Lake, I passed over the Bow Bridge. Being a calm, clear, and lovely summer evening, there were plenty of folks out on the water in rowboats. Many were couples, both young and old, with the occasional family.

The most alarming part of the entire trip occurred as I crossed the bridge and heard a child start to scream like he was being axe murdered. A family was in a boat just under the bridge and the boy had seen a bee buzzing by. His family was trying to shush him and calm him down, particularly since his jumping around and panicking in an attempt to get clear of the bee was about to put them all into the drink. The bee left, the calm returned.

Rats! Yes, there were rats in the park. In fact, there were A LOT of rats in the park.

It might have been the time of day. I’m no expert on rats, but from my long ago Boy Scout days I would expect critters to be coming out to feed as night falls. Once you noticed them and became aware of their presence, they could be seen almost anywhere there was ivy, bushes, or other ground cover. They all looked very well fed, no doubt because of all of the food that was stuffed into the trash barrels. At one point we passed by a nest of them where they were coming out of a series of holes under the sidewalk. Shades of “Willard!”

More to my taste, there were a lot of birds in the park that I did not expect to see there. The usual urban sparrows, robins, starlings, crows, pigeons, and the like were all there in droves. Ducks? Okay, not totally unexpected next to a lake. But I also saw a heron and a whole flock of Canada geese.

When I got to the Bethesda Fountain, across the water was the Loeb Boathouse. No boats for us today, but on the next trip it’s high on the list. Assuming we don’t come in December, of course.

I don’t know if it was the time of day or the location (much more research needed!) but this is where I first started encountering the street musicians and entertainers. A jazz band, a guitarist, several varieties of drummers, a guy playing a mean sitar, plus things like guys making humongous soap bubbles.

Moving up onto the Bethesda Terrace and back toward The Pond where The Long-Suffering Wife was parked to relax, I saw an array of recreational activities taking place. Outdoor yoga classes, tai chi classes, running groups, an art class, tours of all sorts, what looked like a photography class, plus the herds of aforementioned Pokemon Go players.

What it reminded me most of was the arboretum I visited in Shanghai a few years ago.

When I found The Long-Suffering Wife, I found she had been making friends. The raccoon was much more semi-domesticated than the rats were. Being a cute little trash panda helps. People were trying to feed it by hand, and while it wasn’t quite tame enough for that, it did keep coming out, looking cute, waiting for food to be left for it, grabbing it, and then taking off into the bushes. The fun part after the food got put down and the area vacated by humans was to see if the raccoon could get to the treat before the rats did. Suffice it to say the raccoon didn’t look malnourished.

As dark was falling, we went on a long Hansom cab ride around the park. It was something I knew The Long-Suffering Wife wanted to do and it did offer a relaxing and entertaining view of about half the park. I didn’t get our driver’s name, but she was full of trivia and information about the park and the different sights we were passing. We did get the horse’s name (of course!) – she was Bunny.

By the time we got done with the carriage ride it was well after 21:00, but this is New York! By our internal clock it was dinner time, albeit on a very long and busy day where we had been up very early. Taking the chance that we couldn’t go too far in that part of town without running into a decent restaurant, we headed south on 7th Avenue in the general direction of Times Square. We never got anywhere close to it because there were multiple places to eat within a block or two. In the Brooklyn Deli I asked for the most “typical” New York City meal I could get for my first night there.

The pot roast was delicious!

Yesterday I wrote about how my head had some pretty “interesting” ideas regarding life in New York City. A month ago, I got to actually visit there for the first time.

I’ll say right up front, we were lucky. We had a huge advantage that most people won’t have on their first trip to New York City. One of The Long-Suffering Wife’s aunts owns an apartment in Manhattan and we were able to use it for the nine days we were there. This not only made a huge difference in the financial considerations for the trip, but it put us right in the heart of the city, right next to Central Park.

My undying gratitude to Aunt Eleanor!

Prior to the trip, as is my wont, there was homework. As I mentioned yesterday, I had already tried to learn as much as I could about the city after I had some potential job opportunities there. Now it was time to get serious.

There are a lot of really great resources out there in cyberspace. If you’re going on any trip to someplace new, I strongly advise you to prepare and use them. It made a tremendous difference for me. I had a lot of good advice about where to go, when to go, what to see, what to avoid, what might be a problem, how to deal with those problems, and so on.

We had a “wish list” of close to a hundred places to see. We were well aware that we would be lucky to get to half of them, or even a third. That wasn’t an issue. I just wanted to avoid being there on the last day with no time left and suddenly slapping myself on the forehead, saying, “How could we have POSSIBLY forgotten to go see the [insert name of famous tourist trap or landmark here]??!!”

Up at Zero Dark Thirty, we left LAX for JFK. Six hours in the air.

Astonishingly for anyone who’s familiar with this website, there will be no dozens and dozens of pictures of clouds and fly-over states at some point. On both the trip east and then back home, we had exit row seats, which means lots of leg room, but no windows. So I didn’t even get to see the city from the air, either coming or going. Something for the next trip.

The TSA lines at that time of day were short to begin with, in addition to the fact that we were both put into the TSA-Pre lines. The plane left pretty much on time, there was little bad weather or turbulence, and we landed on time. There were no lost luggage issues. We were out the door and hitting the ground running.

Well, we ran about a hundred feet until we got into the line for a taxi. To their credit, this was very well organized and moved right along. It looks bad, but it wasn’t more than maybe ten minutes before we were in a cab. It also bought us a few minutes to start acclimatizing to the heat and humidity while still staying in the shade.

New York City cab rides. They are everything you’ve ever heard about and more. I loved them, which may be one of the more bizarre results of the trip.

When I’m behind the wheel, very little pisses me off more than drivers who are constantly bending the rules and outright breaking them to try to get past that one next car. If you zoom along in through traffic while I’m stuck in the lane that’s exiting onto another freeway and you want to cut me off and get into line at the last possible second, we’ll see who has the better insurance. If you’re driving along on the shoulder, I’ll be trying to get your license and calling the Highway Patrol to report you. If you’re swinging through lanes like you’re in a pinball machine, I’ll be rooting for you to wrap yourself around a bridge abutment.

And I never, ever, under any conceivable circumstances even back out of the driveway without my seat belt on.

Not in a New York taxi cab.

Almost every driver we had took every opportunity to do every single thing that would send me into a frothing road rage if someone did it to me when I was driving. Sitting in the back seat of a NYC cab, I thought it was a truly delightful ride, almost like being on a roller coaster. And I never once put on my seat belt.

I have no explanation for it, logical or otherwise. It’s a complete 180° turn in my most basic attitudes across the boards. I knew it at the time, I was surprised and astonished by it – and I didn’t care. Go figure. (For the record, once back in LA, I’m still the same old stickler for the rules of the road when I’m driving. Maybe it was the water.)

Coming into the city from JFK, this was the first glimpse I had of the skyline ahead of us. I was ready, I was relaxed, I was excited.

Once we got into our apartment, having been flying all day with nothing but a little bit of airport food at 05:00 and some coach-class airline food in flight, it was time to eat. We found a lovely little restaurant on Central Park South, across the street from Central Park (that’s all the green stuff on the far side of the street) and less than two blocks from where we were staying.

While the food was great, what was better was what we spent a lot of time doing – watching people and the city go by. In this case, the parade of humanity wandering by was as cosmopolitan as any I’ve seen anywhere in the world. And watching the limos and town cars jockey for spots to double and triple park  while waiting for their clients was like watching a bizarre ballet where I couldn’t hear the music. I had nothing but admiration for the show.

It was only about 17:00 local time and while we had been up early three time zones away, adrenaline is a marvelous thing. With my bag of cameras in hand, we headed toward Central Park. The Long-Suffering Wife found a shady spot to people watch and I started to explore.

The different vistas offered were wonderful and varied. I would love to come back over the different seasons and see them as they change through the year.

The park today is lush and well maintained. It wasn’t crowded, but it was far, far from empty. Part of that was the time of day – the longer I stayed there, the more crowds I saw. Joggers, people on bikes, people with dogs, and people hunting Pokemon.

I knew it was a thing, but I had no clue how much of a thing it was in Central Park. Herds of people chasing around after imaginary digital critters like the bison once crossed the Great Plains. They all seemed to be having a good time.

There are rock outcroppings, streams, lakes, meadows, and all manor of landscapes. The more I saw, the more I loved the place.

I was also completely blown away by how freakin’ HUGE it is. It’s one thing to see it on a map and say, “Okay, that’s a big park.” It’s another to spend nearly three hours walking and twisting along the paths and stopping to watch some of the wildlife and watching all of the people, only to realize that I might have covered maybe 20% of the park. Maybe.

I wound my way around The Pond, past The Dairy and the Chess & Checkers Building, finally pausing at Sheep Meadow. After work, a summer evening, good weather, there were couples, families, people playing frisbee, tossing a football, a high school field hockey team practicing, people doing yoga and tai chi, the occasional cop keeping an eye on things… With some of the world’s biggest skyscrapers surrounding you in all directions.

I was almost overwhelmed. Central Park is wonderful!

In sorting pictures from NYC. One batch I was looking for was these. I was curious. Story to follow, it’s very late tonight.

I really, really loved New York City.