Click any image to make it bigger in Photobucket.
Nerd! Sometimes being a tourist is fun. We lamented that we couldn't go to the top, but then again, if we were inside it, we wouldn't be able to see it, now would we?
17 more images below the jump.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Pictures 18: Midtown
June 18 found us wandering Midtown (we spent one day in Lower Manhattan, one day in Midtown and a half a day way up near Grant's Tomb - that photo post is coming later). We skipped most of the touristy stuff for lack of funds (no adventure to the top of the Empire State Building - it's $18 a head to stand in line for three hours! What?!) but did manage to see everything that we could see that was free. And now you can see some of it too.
Click any image to make it bigger in Photobucket.
Nerd! Sometimes being a tourist is fun. We lamented that we couldn't go to the top, but then again, if we were inside it, we wouldn't be able to see it, now would we?
17 more images below the jump.
Click any image to make it bigger in Photobucket.
Nerd! Sometimes being a tourist is fun. We lamented that we couldn't go to the top, but then again, if we were inside it, we wouldn't be able to see it, now would we?
17 more images below the jump.
Pictures 17: Summer in the city
Having grown up in New Jersey, I think I'm a little blase to the city - well, I'm kind of blase to any city.
You know how there is always some "big city" of your childhood? Like, if you grow up in Nebraska, maybe it's Omaha, and if you grow up in eastern Washington perhaps it's Spokane, or if you're from Florida it's Tampa. You can be used to going to Omaha or Spokane or Tampa and still be totally blown away when visiting New York. But it's hard to be used to going to New York and be blown away by Omaha or Spokane or Tampa or... anywhere, really. So when New York City is "the city" of your childhood, you're kinda hard to impress sometimes.
That's not to say that I'm city-savvy. I think I was pretty good when I was in high school and during the first half of college, but now that I've lived away for seven years and haven't spent an extended amount of time at home for five of those years, I find myself getting "misplaced" (I prefer to use that word rather than "lost," because I think "lost" connotes hopelessness, whereas "misplaced" implies that I've only gone slightly off-course and will be righted soon) more often than I ever used to.
One thing I can definitely recommend to anyone visiting New York is that you should have a plan. Have places you want to go and know where they are. There is always a time and a place for spontaneity, and I'm hardly saying you should put a chokehold on your schedule, but I've done New York both ways - wandering around aimlessly and going in with an agenda - and personally, I prefer the latter.
It's especially useful in New York because, since the buildings are so tall and there are just so damn many streets, it's very easy to miss what you wanted to see. For example, we had to basically spiral around inward on streets around in order to find the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site - there's no way we would have found it if we didn't know it was there. Had we just wandered around the city, we certainly would have missed it - and I'm glad we made it there, because it was pretty awesome.
But anyhow, I promised you pictures, so here are some pictures - these were all taken on June 16 (wow, that was a long time ago!). I present you with a random sampling of lower Manhattan before I move on to more specific locales.
Click any image to make it larger in Photobucket.
Buildings. I like buildings. This is somewhere down in the Financial District.
17 more images below the jump...
You know how there is always some "big city" of your childhood? Like, if you grow up in Nebraska, maybe it's Omaha, and if you grow up in eastern Washington perhaps it's Spokane, or if you're from Florida it's Tampa. You can be used to going to Omaha or Spokane or Tampa and still be totally blown away when visiting New York. But it's hard to be used to going to New York and be blown away by Omaha or Spokane or Tampa or... anywhere, really. So when New York City is "the city" of your childhood, you're kinda hard to impress sometimes.
That's not to say that I'm city-savvy. I think I was pretty good when I was in high school and during the first half of college, but now that I've lived away for seven years and haven't spent an extended amount of time at home for five of those years, I find myself getting "misplaced" (I prefer to use that word rather than "lost," because I think "lost" connotes hopelessness, whereas "misplaced" implies that I've only gone slightly off-course and will be righted soon) more often than I ever used to.
One thing I can definitely recommend to anyone visiting New York is that you should have a plan. Have places you want to go and know where they are. There is always a time and a place for spontaneity, and I'm hardly saying you should put a chokehold on your schedule, but I've done New York both ways - wandering around aimlessly and going in with an agenda - and personally, I prefer the latter.
It's especially useful in New York because, since the buildings are so tall and there are just so damn many streets, it's very easy to miss what you wanted to see. For example, we had to basically spiral around inward on streets around in order to find the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site - there's no way we would have found it if we didn't know it was there. Had we just wandered around the city, we certainly would have missed it - and I'm glad we made it there, because it was pretty awesome.
But anyhow, I promised you pictures, so here are some pictures - these were all taken on June 16 (wow, that was a long time ago!). I present you with a random sampling of lower Manhattan before I move on to more specific locales.
Click any image to make it larger in Photobucket.
Buildings. I like buildings. This is somewhere down in the Financial District.
17 more images below the jump...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
They're just things.
There is so much to write about, and before I was getting overwhelmed that I could never, ever possibly catch up. But then I realized that I've been in this predicament before. Last time I got behind was the first time this summer that I went to Pittsburgh, and I solved that problem easily enough by writing about Pittsburgh via pictures, and showing pictures via writing about Pittsburgh. Eventually, then, I will show you pictures from the first three weeks of this trip, and tell you about the trip via pictures. Problem solved! Ta da!
But what I find far more interesting than simply showing you pictures is telling you about all the things we have broken, lost or otherwise destroyed.
LOST
1 pair of earrings. When we stayed a night in Northampton Beach State Park, a great little campground in the Adirondacks, we were tempted to stay a second night. It was just that nice. Our campsite was right on the shore of the Great Scandaga Lake, the park was quiet, the landscape was beautiful, and the people were nice. That night I went to take a shower, and I was wearing a pair of tree earrings I got a few years ago at Santa Fe Hemp. I hung the earrings by poking them through the shower curtain. "I'll probably forget these," I thought to myself. And then I did. I went back the next morning and found the little holes in the shower curtain, but no earrings hanging from them.
1 sock. I pride myself on getting through three years of living in college dorms without ever losing a single sock. Seriously. But then, in the months of October-January 2007-2008, I somehow lost 6 socks from 6 different pairs. As a result, I am truly haunted by the prospect of losing socks. When we stayed with Patrick's uncle in Burlington Flats, New York, we did some laundry, and I lost a sock. RIP yellow and white sock.
1 laptop charger. My laptop is very old - in laptop years, at least. It's a Compaq Presario V2000 that I got in spring 2006, when I spilled coffee in my old(er) laptop during midterms week and had to make an emergency purchase of a new computer. It's still trucking, though, even though the battery only holds about 5 minutes of charge. So when I left my laptop charger at a Wendy's in Rome, New York, discovered I did so in Rochester, New York, and I had some work due to my editor in Santa Fe only a few days later, it was no good. I called my dad, who keeps extras of everything on earth, and he had an extra laptop charger for my computer. He sent it to my brother's house Pittsburgh, where we would be in the next few days, and we went to Best Buy and picked up a replacement charger (for $86!). Once we got the charger from my dad in Pittsburgh, we returned the charger to the Best Buy there. Crisis averted.
BROKEN
1 car radio. On the 4th of July, we were driving to the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, New York. A super incredibly horrible and obnoxious commercial came on the radio. I freaked out and turned the volume down to nil. And the radio clicked completely off. I thought, whatever, I must have just turned it off. But when I went to turn it back on, it didn't come back on. Not even the clock. Patrick checked the fuses, and they were fine. Everything else on my dashboard works. RIP Radio. (We had my mom send me by battery-powered iPod player from NJ, but of course she couldn't find the power cord. My iPod, which is also from 2006, only holds about 2 hours' worth of charge, so we have to charge it periodically.)
1 external hard drive. My laptop, being 800 years old, doesn't have much storage left, so I have been totally dependent on an external hard drive for a few years now. I have all my images since I started college (August 2003) on my external drive. So you can imagine my confusion when, while we were still in New Jersey, I plugged it in one day to have it just... Not show up on my desktop. We tried plugging it in to my parents' desktop, and it worked - so we thought it was my USB ports. But then we plugged Patrick's phone into my USB port and it showed up fine. I knew I wouldn't be able to empty my camera's memory card unless I somehow got external storage space, so when we went to the Best Buy in Pittsburgh to return my laptop power cord, we stopped by Target to get a Western Digital 320-gig Passport. This is literally smaller than Patrick's wallet, needs no AC power source (like my old hard drive did) and olds nearly 2 times what my old drive did (it held 186 gigs). Plus, it's pink. Needless to say, I'm happy. It had mixed reviews online, but we have been using it for a few weeks now and I couldn't be happier. We didn't want to spend $15 on a case so we keep it in a sock. Meanwhile, I sent my old drive home with my brother for my dad to tinker with.
BROKEN AND RESURRECTED
1 camera. Patrick has an old Nikon digital camera that he's been toting around the country with him, and since my Canon takes better pictures, we have been using my camera for stills and his for videos. When we went to Niagara Falls, we went on the Cave of the Winds tour, which is pretty much the coolest thing ever - you can basically stand under the falling water on the "Hurricane Deck." Naturally, Patrick did, and he wanted me to get some photos and video of him doing so. They call it the Hurricane Deck for a reason - I've never been in a hurricane, but Patrick has, having lived most of his life in Florida, and he said the name is pretty accurate. The camera got completely soaked. Naturally, later that night, it wouldn't turn on. But we left it in the sun for a while that day, apparently dried it off enough, and it turned on again eventually. Soon we'll get that video off the camera and see how awesome (and totally unintelligible) it is.
STILL WORKS (THANK GOD)
Car air conditioner. As I mentioned in my last post, it has been hot as hell pretty much the whole time we've been on the road (it was a little chilly in Burlington Flats, but that's about all the respite we've gotten). If the car air conditioner conks out, I swear to god I am going home. Or just driving north until I hit the arctic circle.
Computer. Sure, I have sucked at blogging, but Facebook has been my link to everyone else in the world to let them know what I'm up to and how we're doing. Not only that, but we have made extensive use of Roadside America, state land bureau websites (to find free or cheap camping) and the like - and once we get to areas where we don't have many friends, we will be using CouchSurfing more (Pat and I both have accounts).
OTHER STATS
Received: 1 speeding ticket (Charlotte in Batavia, New York - we hate Batavia)
Locked in car: 1 car key (Patrick in Batavia, New York - did I mention we hate Batavia?)
Copy made: 1 car key (Henrietta, New York)
There will undoubtedly be more things to add to this type of an entry, but hopefully nothing else vital breaks or goes missing. But if they do, oh well. They're just things, right?
But what I find far more interesting than simply showing you pictures is telling you about all the things we have broken, lost or otherwise destroyed.
LOST
1 pair of earrings. When we stayed a night in Northampton Beach State Park, a great little campground in the Adirondacks, we were tempted to stay a second night. It was just that nice. Our campsite was right on the shore of the Great Scandaga Lake, the park was quiet, the landscape was beautiful, and the people were nice. That night I went to take a shower, and I was wearing a pair of tree earrings I got a few years ago at Santa Fe Hemp. I hung the earrings by poking them through the shower curtain. "I'll probably forget these," I thought to myself. And then I did. I went back the next morning and found the little holes in the shower curtain, but no earrings hanging from them.
1 sock. I pride myself on getting through three years of living in college dorms without ever losing a single sock. Seriously. But then, in the months of October-January 2007-2008, I somehow lost 6 socks from 6 different pairs. As a result, I am truly haunted by the prospect of losing socks. When we stayed with Patrick's uncle in Burlington Flats, New York, we did some laundry, and I lost a sock. RIP yellow and white sock.
1 laptop charger. My laptop is very old - in laptop years, at least. It's a Compaq Presario V2000 that I got in spring 2006, when I spilled coffee in my old(er) laptop during midterms week and had to make an emergency purchase of a new computer. It's still trucking, though, even though the battery only holds about 5 minutes of charge. So when I left my laptop charger at a Wendy's in Rome, New York, discovered I did so in Rochester, New York, and I had some work due to my editor in Santa Fe only a few days later, it was no good. I called my dad, who keeps extras of everything on earth, and he had an extra laptop charger for my computer. He sent it to my brother's house Pittsburgh, where we would be in the next few days, and we went to Best Buy and picked up a replacement charger (for $86!). Once we got the charger from my dad in Pittsburgh, we returned the charger to the Best Buy there. Crisis averted.
BROKEN
1 car radio. On the 4th of July, we were driving to the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, New York. A super incredibly horrible and obnoxious commercial came on the radio. I freaked out and turned the volume down to nil. And the radio clicked completely off. I thought, whatever, I must have just turned it off. But when I went to turn it back on, it didn't come back on. Not even the clock. Patrick checked the fuses, and they were fine. Everything else on my dashboard works. RIP Radio. (We had my mom send me by battery-powered iPod player from NJ, but of course she couldn't find the power cord. My iPod, which is also from 2006, only holds about 2 hours' worth of charge, so we have to charge it periodically.)
1 external hard drive. My laptop, being 800 years old, doesn't have much storage left, so I have been totally dependent on an external hard drive for a few years now. I have all my images since I started college (August 2003) on my external drive. So you can imagine my confusion when, while we were still in New Jersey, I plugged it in one day to have it just... Not show up on my desktop. We tried plugging it in to my parents' desktop, and it worked - so we thought it was my USB ports. But then we plugged Patrick's phone into my USB port and it showed up fine. I knew I wouldn't be able to empty my camera's memory card unless I somehow got external storage space, so when we went to the Best Buy in Pittsburgh to return my laptop power cord, we stopped by Target to get a Western Digital 320-gig Passport. This is literally smaller than Patrick's wallet, needs no AC power source (like my old hard drive did) and olds nearly 2 times what my old drive did (it held 186 gigs). Plus, it's pink. Needless to say, I'm happy. It had mixed reviews online, but we have been using it for a few weeks now and I couldn't be happier. We didn't want to spend $15 on a case so we keep it in a sock. Meanwhile, I sent my old drive home with my brother for my dad to tinker with.
BROKEN AND RESURRECTED
1 camera. Patrick has an old Nikon digital camera that he's been toting around the country with him, and since my Canon takes better pictures, we have been using my camera for stills and his for videos. When we went to Niagara Falls, we went on the Cave of the Winds tour, which is pretty much the coolest thing ever - you can basically stand under the falling water on the "Hurricane Deck." Naturally, Patrick did, and he wanted me to get some photos and video of him doing so. They call it the Hurricane Deck for a reason - I've never been in a hurricane, but Patrick has, having lived most of his life in Florida, and he said the name is pretty accurate. The camera got completely soaked. Naturally, later that night, it wouldn't turn on. But we left it in the sun for a while that day, apparently dried it off enough, and it turned on again eventually. Soon we'll get that video off the camera and see how awesome (and totally unintelligible) it is.
STILL WORKS (THANK GOD)
Car air conditioner. As I mentioned in my last post, it has been hot as hell pretty much the whole time we've been on the road (it was a little chilly in Burlington Flats, but that's about all the respite we've gotten). If the car air conditioner conks out, I swear to god I am going home. Or just driving north until I hit the arctic circle.
Computer. Sure, I have sucked at blogging, but Facebook has been my link to everyone else in the world to let them know what I'm up to and how we're doing. Not only that, but we have made extensive use of Roadside America, state land bureau websites (to find free or cheap camping) and the like - and once we get to areas where we don't have many friends, we will be using CouchSurfing more (Pat and I both have accounts).
OTHER STATS
Received: 1 speeding ticket (Charlotte in Batavia, New York - we hate Batavia)
Locked in car: 1 car key (Patrick in Batavia, New York - did I mention we hate Batavia?)
Copy made: 1 car key (Henrietta, New York)
There will undoubtedly be more things to add to this type of an entry, but hopefully nothing else vital breaks or goes missing. But if they do, oh well. They're just things, right?
Friday, July 16, 2010
Just another day on the rebound road...
Patrick and I have been on the road for nearly three weeks and I have yet to finish my entries about our NY/NJ adventures from before we left. This is a problem with me and my writing lately (and by "lately" I mean the last 5 or 6 years that I have attempted to re-start a daily journal) - when I get really behind, I find it hard to start up again because I feel like I have missed so much and it's almost a lost cause. I want to be able to record everything, every day, every place we go, everything we do. It's impossible - especially when I am a full month behind, blog-wise.
So I am sitting here in Dexter, Michigan, realizing I have put this off for far too long - and since yesterday was a perfect example of the kind of incredibly strange day I expect to have on the road, I knew I needed to sit down and write about it.
This is what I have skipped blogging, and what I hope to catch up on eventually: wandering around Manhattan, deciding suddenly that we needed to leave (and fast), figuring out precisely how to leave so fast, spending a week in upstate New York from the Hudson Valley to Niagara Falls, a few days in Pittsburgh, a few days in Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park (which I definitely do have to write about; it was a mixed bag, but overall pretty cool), two days or so in Columbus, Ohio, and now Michigan.
So read about yesterday below the jump - which includes (but is not limited to) giant ears of corn, a house-sized fiberglass loaf of bread, Manchester, Michigan's world-famous chicken broil, and a bunch of Christians in a flooded basement.
So I am sitting here in Dexter, Michigan, realizing I have put this off for far too long - and since yesterday was a perfect example of the kind of incredibly strange day I expect to have on the road, I knew I needed to sit down and write about it.
This is what I have skipped blogging, and what I hope to catch up on eventually: wandering around Manhattan, deciding suddenly that we needed to leave (and fast), figuring out precisely how to leave so fast, spending a week in upstate New York from the Hudson Valley to Niagara Falls, a few days in Pittsburgh, a few days in Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park (which I definitely do have to write about; it was a mixed bag, but overall pretty cool), two days or so in Columbus, Ohio, and now Michigan.
So read about yesterday below the jump - which includes (but is not limited to) giant ears of corn, a house-sized fiberglass loaf of bread, Manchester, Michigan's world-famous chicken broil, and a bunch of Christians in a flooded basement.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Sandy Hook revisited
Much like Morristown National Historical Park, I have been visiting the Sandy Hook area of Gateway National Recreation Area since I was a kid, but never went there specifically for its role in the National Park System. My family used to go down there to swim all the time when my brother and I were kids - there were no gaudy boardwalks and piers to distract us from the ocean (which was probably very convenient, since I was - and perhaps still am - one of those kids who insisted their parents buy them something at every possible opportunity), and it's essentially the northernmost and thus closest expanse of beach along the Jersey shore.
Patrick and I went down on Monday, June 14 - it's generally a good idea to do all of one's shore-visiting on a weekday, because weekends get pretty ridiculous (Pat said that, when he came into New Jersey on June 12, it was the first time he'd ever heard a radio traffic report on a weekend - it was most likely for shore traffic).
Gateway National Recreation Area has sections both in New Jersey and New York; the Sandy Hook unit is the only one in New Jersey, and in New York it has areas on the southern shore of Staten Island and in Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn and Queens. I've never been to either of the New York areas, mostly because they're a pain in the ass to get to. Sorry, New York, but that's just the way it is.
Patrick and I went down on Monday, June 14 - it's generally a good idea to do all of one's shore-visiting on a weekday, because weekends get pretty ridiculous (Pat said that, when he came into New Jersey on June 12, it was the first time he'd ever heard a radio traffic report on a weekend - it was most likely for shore traffic).
Gateway National Recreation Area has sections both in New Jersey and New York; the Sandy Hook unit is the only one in New Jersey, and in New York it has areas on the southern shore of Staten Island and in Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn and Queens. I've never been to either of the New York areas, mostly because they're a pain in the ass to get to. Sorry, New York, but that's just the way it is.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Value of History - Morristown, NJ
The second day of Patrick's visit - the first full day he spent in New Jersey - we decided to waste no time in starting our exploration of New Jersey's participation in the National Parks System. New Jersey only has four sites that are part of the NPS - five if you count the Statue of Liberty (which is considered in New York) - and two of them straddle state lines, so we had some looking around to do.
First on the lineup was Morristown National Historical Park, which I've visited a hundred times before but have never really appreciated as a part of the NPS. My town, Chatham, is right next to Morristown, so as kids we always went on field trips to the area - especially to Jockey Hollow, which is the area where Washington's troops spent their most horrid winter during the American Revolution. We visited the park on Sunday, June 13, which was a slightly cool and overcast day in the morning, but turned into a day of torrential downpour as time went on. But that's later.
First on the lineup was Morristown National Historical Park, which I've visited a hundred times before but have never really appreciated as a part of the NPS. My town, Chatham, is right next to Morristown, so as kids we always went on field trips to the area - especially to Jockey Hollow, which is the area where Washington's troops spent their most horrid winter during the American Revolution. We visited the park on Sunday, June 13, which was a slightly cool and overcast day in the morning, but turned into a day of torrential downpour as time went on. But that's later.
Book excerpt: The Last Three Miles
In that spirit, I'd like to present you with an excerpt from Steven Hart's book, The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway, a book about the Pulaski Skyway. I started reading it upon coming home, and admittedly I stalled (no pun intended) on page 100 of the 192-page book; it was a little dry for my taste and I couldn't really get into it. I'd be willing to give it another go, however, after rediscovering this passage, which is a truly evocative description of driving from the Holland Tunnel and across the Skyway. (The author is a born-and-bred New Jerseyan.)
Below is the excerpt, in bold.
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