Daily Archive for February 1st, 2008

Location: New York, NY

Diego and Elena had to leave for work at 9 a.m., so Julia and I got our things together and hit the road at that time. It was nice to spend some time with them and we owe them our gratitude for putting us up in a pinch. After leaving their apartment, we drove north through Brooklyn and into Queens, where we spent some time admiring the view of midtown Manhattan from Gantry Plaza State Park.

After leaving the park, we spent about 30 minutes sitting in traffic trying to cross the Queens Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan. Though we wanted to visit really typical tourist traps as if we had never been to the city before, we didn’t want to leave Data in the car somewhere. Parking is terrible in the city, so we decided to delay our tourism until tomorrow. Instead, we drove to Staten Island and visited my grandmother’s former house. The property sits directly on New York Harbor and has sweeping views of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I have many memories of playing badminton in the back yard while admiring the skyline at night, so it was very nice to go back.

We continued a tour of my family’s history by visiting my mother’s former apartment and high school in Fort Hamilton, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. We decided not to take the Expressway back to Manhattan, opting to drive through the Brooklyn neighborhoods. This would prove to be a mistake. Traffic moved slowly and, as always, New York City drivers proved to be shameless in their desire to be first at the red light. The drive back to Manhattan took us until after sundown, but we were able to find a parking spot near Union Square Park with relative ease.

At 6 p.m., we met Dave, a photographer friend of mine for dinner at Otto. When we arrived, we were seated in an empty room. By the time we left, we were completely surrounded by people dining and being noisy. The food was minimalistic and decent, but not great.

After dinner, we walked a few blocks to 16th Street, where we will be staying for the next few nights. John, who we met with a number of times in Las Vegas, lives near Union Square and has offered to let us stay with him. This should work out well because we can leave Data at the house while we use the subway to get around.

After saying hi to John and bringing some of our things in, we found a much better parking spot and managed to snag it. We then bought some dessert from a nearby grocery store before settling in for the night.

Tomorrow, we had hoped to see things like the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center site, Central Park and so on, but the forecast for tomorrow predicts rain, so we will simply have to see what happens.

Here are photos from today. Click “there’s more to this” to see them all or visit my SmugMug.

Manhattan from Queens. Click on the above image for a larger version. Continue reading ‘Day 201: Circling the Block’