Day 1, Tuesday, July 20:
Our first task was to figure out the subway system and get to our hotel, which wasn't too difficult. We had spent a fair amount of time figuring out a not-too-expensive hotel that wouldn't require a lot of travel time to get to what we wanted to see and had ended up with a place only 3 blocks west of the middle of Central Park. The block was beautiful, lined with old brownstone buildings, but the inside--well, it was clean. Narrow hallways, bathroom down the hall, layers and layers of paint. Gideon said, "This is the crummiest hotel we've ever stayed in." At first I thought
he was saying that it was the COOLEST hotel. My heart did sink a little at the thought of staying there for four nights, but it actually turned out to be fine. The beds were clean with sheets changed very day, there was only one time that I wanted to get in the bathroom and it was in use, and it was very quiet. There was a nice little cafe on the corner and a subway stop only 3-4 blocks away. We dumped our bags and headed for the Empire State Building. Our guidebook said that midweek and during the dinner hour were the best times to go, and we were hitting them both. Wait times can be hours, but we spent perhaps half an hour getting up to the top (or at least the 80th floor--we didn't spring for the extra $15 to go up on the spire), got in a picture of me with King Kong right before he took off at 5:00, and got the great views from the top. Altogether a very successful start to our trip. Well, we thought, let's see about getting tickets for a show. It's a weeknight, so things shouldn't be too booked up. Our first option was to see "The Addams Family," a new musical that we saw advertised on 
a brochure in the hotel registration office. (Don't you just love the way we plan ahead?) Our second option was to see "Wicked," which sounds awful but which is apparently quite delightful. So we ended up in Times Square, which Gideon says he really liked but which I was decidedly unimpressed with, found the discount TKTS booth, were told that "Wicked" and "Addams Family" weren't discounting tickets, trekked over to the theater for AF, were told that the cheap seats ($51.50!) were sold out, sent Jim to reconnoiter about Wicked, found out that it was COMPLETELY sold out, SIX YEARS after it opened, with a lobby full of little girls dressed up as p
rincesses, or good witches, or whatever. Jim said he didn't think they wanted a big sweaty male in there anyway. So we ended up getting cheap seats ($56.50!!) for AF for Friday night. Oh-kay. Now we needed dinner. Our guidebook said that there was a good pizza place near TS, so we ended up there. I didn't think the pizza was all that great, but it was a fun place--very big, very noisy, and very fast. An extremely friendly elderly gentleman stopped at our table to welcome us to New York--his wife said that he thought he was the mayor. We made our way to Rockefeller Center, poked our noses into St. Patrick's Cathedral, and then decided to head f
or the hotel. And we did end up there--eventually. Please note: always have a plan in mind if you're taking a mode of transportation for which it is possible to get split up. Let's just say that Jim's gallantry in trying to find me cost him and Gideon a fair amount of time and frustration.Day 2, Wednesday, July 21:
I had heard on NPR about a new book detailing the culinary history of immigrant families living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. The author was the director of a museum there, so I thought it sounded worth a visit. We chose the garment workers' tour and were given a real glimpse into the lives of people who landed in NY and ended up sitting in stifling little rooms hunched over treadle sewing machines or handwork, being paid by the piece. Water had to be carried upstairs from a pump in the yard. Laundry had to be hung from a line in the kitchen. People slept in all sorts of strange contortions, the most memorable being that of the boys who had their upper bodies on a couch and their feet on chairs. The woman of the household had to keep schlepping that water, no matter what. After this fascinating tour (which I would highly recommend and which isn't on the top list of attractions in NY) we sp
oiled tourists went across the street to get gelato from a famous place and then headed to somewhere that isn't even IN most guidebooks: Wave Hill Gardens in Brooklyn. I had read about this place in a gardening book and had thought vaguely that maybe I could go there and Gideon and Jim could do something else, but we all went--no more splitting up for us! It ended up being quite an expedition, but we made it, and it is a truly lovely place. I wish we had had a little more time and that I had worn my hat, but we enjoyed it. Just don't expect the Hall of Armor to have any actual armor in it. Our trip back was MUCH easier, as we caught the shuttle that took us directly to the
subway station. We headed toward Ground Zero but couldn't see anything to speak of at all as it's all fenced off and full of cranes and cement trucks. We were told later that there was a memorial chapel there on the other side from where we were, but to me simply being there was haunting. For some reason I've always thought that the World Trade Center was right on the water and off by itself--I had no idea that it was just there on the street. Kind of ignorant of me, I guess. What it must have been like to have those huge buildings collapsing right there in the middle of everything! And now the surrounding buildings are carrying on as usual. We were reminded of how long the cleanup/construction effort has been going on by the fact that the little deli where we ate was still offering a 15% discount to anyone in a hard hat. I'm not sure what else we crammed in for this day, but we had earned our rest in our crummy cool hotel by the time we got there.Day 3, Thursday, July 22:
I had been told a couple of weeks before we left on this trip that I needed to book our tickets for the Statue of Liberty ahead of time as they tended to get sold out. Well, alas for us, the tickets to go up into the crown were sold out well into September. However, there were still tickets for climbing up onto the pedestal. The only time that seemed feasible for us to go during our stay was 8:00 AM on this day, so I had a total heart attack getting us going, urged Gideon to wait on breakfast until we were sure we were going to get there on time, and then, of course, ended up realizing that there was no big rush. In spite of the fact that we were in the first batch of the day we didn't get on that ferry until well after 8:00 and would have had plenty of time for breakfast. Oh well. You never know. Other than the statue itself my favorite memory of this outing is that of a little woman showing a policeman a page with something highlighted on it, trying to get some kind of information. The policeman said, "Lady, I can't read that--it's in Japanese!" I must say that coming into the harbor and seeing that gigantic statue is pretty heart-stopping. You see pictures of it all the time with people and buildings around it to give it scale, but I at least didn't quite take in how big it (she?) is. (I still want to find out what she's doing with her back foot. Jim thinks she's pulling free of chains.) Of course, once you get onto the island and climb the pedestal you can't see much of the statue itself, but I made sure I did lots of peering up at her anyway. Jim's friend Vince (of whom more later) said that he always just tells people to take the Staten Island ferry instead of the actual SOL one. It's free, and the view is just as good. However, our tickets also includ
ed Ellis Island, something I wouldn't have wanted to miss. Another thing I didn't realize: EI was for the steerage passengers. The richer passengers were processed by customs and immigration onboard the actual ship. The poorer ones, who had already endured weeks at sea in appalling conditions, were herded onto ferries (since the ship couldn't come in that far) and taken to EI, where they could be told that they 1) were free to come in, 2) had to stay in the hospital/quarantine area because they had some type of physical or mental problem, or 3) had to go back. And only one person could stay with you if you had to stay for treatment. We got in on an extra tour of the hospital building that's still being restored, which was a big plus. Between Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum I came back inspired to do more reading on what the whole immigration experience was like. After we got back we thought we'd try to get in a view of the Brook
lyn Bridge at sunset, but Gideon and I kind of wimped out. That is a long bridge! I had thought we'd walk all the way across it, but then we'd have had to walk back . . . so Jim walked up to the first tower, about a third of the way across, while Gideon and I waited for him. There's a pedestrian/bike walkway over it, so mixed in with the tourists were plenty of people just going home from work. It reminds me of seeing the Circus Maximus in Rome and noticing that there was someone jogging around it. It was just his normal routine. Anyway, we needed to make a stab at Chinatown and had read in our guidebook that there was this fabulous ice cream place there, so, somewhat restored by our wait on the bridge, we hiked over there, passing a seafood shop with an squid (or possibly a misshapen jellyfish) hanging in it. We managed to get our ice cream and headed home to bed.Day 4, Friday, July 23:
We had our tickets to the show for this evening, so with that in mind we decided to hit a few final big items. Since the M
etropolitan Museum of Art is one of the biggest attractions in NY we decided to go there first, hitting a "Hot and Crusty" place for breakfast. Great pastries. (Gideon is a serious bread and pastry man.) I got very tickled with a woman on the subway who tried to tell me that we had passed the museum way back and were going the wrong way on the wrong side of the park, and I had to show her on my map that I did indeed know what I was doing. She was trying to be helpful, but it was pretty funny--she had the art museum mixed up with natural history one. The MMA is pretty much like the Louvre--too much to take in, confusing, but stuffed with great stuff. We kept gett
ing split up (so much for our good intentions there) and Jim and I were rushing around trying to find Gideon when we passed that very famous Rembrandt of "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." I said, "Oh look!" and then we were past it. We did end up wandering by there again, though. I was most impressed by the Egyptian rooms, including as they do a genuine temple. Statues, paintings, armor (a suit worn by Henry VIII!). Tiffany windows. At least one Vermeer. Blur, blur, blur. Click, click, click. At some point in this trip I said that the days were rushing by just like the windows on the subway. We land back outside. That visit's over. Where to next? Let's walk across Central Park, take a look at some sort of castle and the outdoor Shakespeare theater where free performances are given every summer and people line up the night before in order to get tickets. For some reason I keep thinking of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had an apartment looking out on Central Park during her last years and for whom the reservoir in the park is now named. Let's peek inside the Museum of Natural History. It's after 4:00, so it's not worth it to buy tickets. We'll just take a look at the dinosaur skeletons in the lobby. Back out the door. Let's get some dinner. Let's get to our theater. Let's get milkshakes since we have some time to kill. Whew!I found the musical interesting on a number of fronts. (In case you're wondering, we're huge fans of the old Addams Family TV show and also liked the first AF movie.) The theater is cramped (originally built in 1901) and doesn't have the greatest sightlines in the world. I hate having heads in front of me, but there wasn't a choice here. The performances were quite good, although if I may say so I think Bebe Neuwirth could have done a bit more with Morticia. The plot is basically "You Can't Take It With You" with dead ancestors thrown in. Of the choices we had for seeing a Broadway show I think we made the best one. In spite of terrible reviews when it opened this past April it's still doing quite well. I don't expect it to still be running five years from now, though. It's amazing, really, that legitimate theater is still going, since we're so spoiled with our special-effects/raked seating/multiple showings/bargain matinee moviegoing habits. It was kind of . . . hopeful. And sweet. Anyway, I'm glad we went.
Day 5, Saturday, July 24:
We checked out of our hotel, lugged our bags to the subway, and set out for Queens, where an old college roommate of Jim's, Vince Sawyer, is the pastor of a church: Faith Baptist Church, "the church with a heart, in the heart of Queens." After a few quandaries over directions we found the church, with Vince and his wife Terri welcoming us. What hospitable people! We had planned to visit the Museum of Moving Images in Queens, which was going to be a real treat for Gideon because it includes an exhibit on video games. Alas. It was closed for renovations, as the Sawyers had helpfully found out. So we went to the Science Museum for the afternoon. Vince took off to play softball in the upper-90's heat. And then we got in on a truly wonderful and unexpected treat: a concert by someone I'd never heard of, Marty Goetz, a Messianic Jewish singer and pianist. What a great evening! Here we were, in downtown Manhattan, in some sort of synagogue or temple or something-or-other, listening to this funny, talented, engaging man talk about his early years in New York City and his conversion to Christianity. I would have hated to miss out on him, and we would never have gone had it not been for the Sawyers.
Day 6, Sunday, July 25:
Church at Faith Baptist, with a rich and theology-dense sermon by Vince and friendly people. We took off after the regular service and headed out for ONE LAST MUSEUM in NYC, the Intrepid Land, Sea and Air Museum down on the docks. We ended up grabbing genuine NYC bagels on the way at the H&H Bagel Company. We've seen a ton of these ship museums over the years, but this one was fun. It was
raining, though, and cold. We persevered. We went through the nuclear submarine. We saw a presentation on Pearl Harbor. We went down the plane elevator. And then we headed back to a little pizza place we had picked out on the way there, had a very mediocre pizza, and made our way to JFK airport to pick up our rental car for our driving trip into upstate New York. That was quite an experience, but everyone was very helpful and the signs were good. Vince had lent us his GPS and given us a map, so we were able to navigate with only a few confusions back to their house, which is a ways from the church and nowhere near a subway station. The Sawyers were gone to a family function, so we had the house to ourselves. It was nice to relax on a couch and watch our Netflix DVD of Monk episoldes that we'd brought with us from home.Day 7, Mon
day, July 26:We had actually planned to leave on Sunday afternoon for our foray into the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, but Vince had offered to take us out on the ocean in his motorboat, so that was on tap for today. I had vaguely thought that we were just going for a short boat ride and that we'd be on our way out of town by early to mid afternoon. Well, au contraire! We went FISHING. It was QUITE an expedition. Vince is an avid fisherman and loves any excuse to go out, but he hadn't gone since the spring. So it worked out wonderfully for everyone: he got to go out and we got another totally unexpected bonus from our visit with them. Terri and I battled bouts of seasickness, but it wasn't too bad--we just couldn't sit for too long in any one spot. Gideon had a ball hauling up fish after fish--all of which had to be thrown back. Poor fish! I decided just not to think about it. We had a few fairly high-speed dashes with the spray flying. I don't think I'd ever been out in a motorboat before. It was totally great. And then it was time to go. We were trying to beat rush hour out of town but didn't really get going until almost 4:00, and our Googlemaps directions were a little confusing, but in the end all was well. It was a little wrenching to leave NYC, but we had other fish to fry. (Terrible, I know.) Our beginning destination was Watkins Glen, at the bottom of Lake Seneca, the largest of New York's Finger Lakes. And why were we going there, you may ask? Well, our reason for visiting this region in the first place was that my parents lived here in 1951 when they were first married. I was born at Sampson Air Force Base hospital in 1952. And my father always talked about the beautiful Finger Lakes. I had memories of a trip up here about 33 years ago one summer when my parents picked my brother Dan and me up from college and drove Dan to his summer job at a camp in New York State. We had driven by the closed-down base, looked at the lake, and gotten a nighttime view of Niagara Falls (and gotten lost on the way back to the hotel, but that's another story). I had a clear memory of seeing a sightseeing boat on the lake and wishing I could do that. Well, this was my chance! We needed a definite destination, and I had some vague idea that Watkins Glen was a nice place, or something my parents had mentioned, or something of the sort. We ended up getting there around bedtime
.
Day 8, Tuesday, July 27:Sometimes it's good not to have any preconceived notions about a place you're visiting. We pulled into the parking lot at the state park and discovered that WG is this gorgeous gorge with waterfalls, trails, and 800 steps. It was a lovely surprise. We spent all morning there, hiking up one way and down the other. (Gideon did say when we got to the top, "Wait--we have to go all the way back down?" They did have a shuttle, but that would have been GIVING UP, and then we would have missed the water lily pond.) I'm sorry to say that the highlight for Gideon was probably the ice cream bar vending machine that flipped open the freezer lid and then picked up your bar with a weird vacuum hose. After our boat trip on the lake we headed up to Geneva, which is at the top of Lake Seneca, looked for a boat rental place, and ended up driving around back roads for awhile. We got to know a stretch of road called Route 96A pretty well and never did find any boats for rent. We stayed at the hotel in Geneva that was right on the lake, our biggest hotel splurge of the trip, and sat on a bench watching the light fade over the lake. It was a real treat.
Day 9, Wednesday, July 28:
Today, finally, we could visit Sampson State Park and see the museum housed in one of the old buildings from the days when this was a military base. We had to wait until today because the place is closed Monday and Tuesday. The website hadn't looked all that impressive, but we had wanted to go because of my father's time there, and of course it turned out to be much more of a big deal than we'd thought. Sampson was a huge naval base during WWII with 40,000 men and then started up as an Air Force base during the Korean War, which is when my dad was there. The naval section of the museum is run by the state since the WWII veterans are now too old the staff it; the same thing will happen soon with the AF area. For now, though, it has some extremely sharp people on site who really know their facts. Jim and I got to talk for some time to one of them, a former training instructor. After our time at Sampson we were left with an afternoon before heading to Niagara Falls. I had done some research about old mansions/homesteads in the area that might be of interest, but we ended up visiting Rose Hill Mansion, a place we had passed on our many passes up and down Route 96A. We thought we'd take a quick peek and then be off and instead had an hour-long tour guided by a very knowledgeable young man who was obviously interested in the families who had lived there. Even Gideon enjoyed it, and he's usually not a big fan of old house tours. And then it was time to head off to the Falls. We found a hotel, were told by the desk clerk about the Wednesday night fireworks (only during July and August), managed in spite of the very confusing signs to park and to there in time, and so ended our day in a very dramatic fashion.
Day 10, Thursday, July 29:
Last day of our trip before flying home! We certainly made the most of it, with trips on the Maid of the Mist boat at the base of the falls (windshield wipers for your sunglasses or perhaps a coating of Rain-X would be helpful; if you keep your glasses on you can't see through the water drops and if you take them off you're blinded by the spray) and to the so-called Cave of the Winds tour, which used to consist of actually going behind the small section of the falls called the Bridal Veil but which now just includes a visit to the so-called "Hurricane Deck," where you have the privilege of getting royally soaked. (Ponchos are provided.) I was a little disappointed in that. We did lots of walking around, looking at the falls from every angle possible, but fairly soon we felt that we had done all there was to do. Since we had been sure to bring along our passports we decided to drive over to the Canadian side. (Originally we had thought that we could land on the Canadian side from the Maid of the Mist but that's not the way it works: there are separate boat trips from each side.) As we came up the road that runs right in front of the falls someone was pulling out from one of the very small number of parking spaces there and we grabbed it. Jim paid for an hour, and we got to see the falls all over again, this time from a much better vantage point, watch a glassblower, visit the gorgeous gardens in Queen Victoria Park, and (for me) almost buy a very expensive hat. It was great, and well worth the rather long wait to get back over to the US side. Our last stop for the day was Buffalo, where we were to catch our flight home the next day. We had quite a time finding a hotel--who would have thought that Buffalo would be so booked up? Super 8 came through for us, though.
Day 11, Friday, July 30:
We were due to arrive home at 11:30 AM after a not-too-bad one-layover flight; that's not what happened, but we did make it by about 5:30. A long day, but the cats were on hand to greet us when we finally got home. What a trip! Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed experiencing it, both originally and while writing this post. We're already planning our next one, a driving trip during Gideon's fall break to visit Cedarville College and take a jog up into Chicago. Keep an eye out for that one.
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