low_delta

I didn't continue to post about our trip. On the Saturday we drove from Gloucester to Beacon. It rained the whole way, so that wasn't fun, but it wasn't raining by the time we got to Beacon. The kids said it was the first weekend it hadn't rained in several months. Jill owns a shop, and business is bad when it rains. We walked around Beacon a bit, nice little town. After the shop closed, we went to Mike's and Jill's place for a bit, then to dinner at a tapas place, then back to their place to talk for a couple of hours.

The next morning we drove down the Hudson to JFK, to return the rental car. Then took the train into the city, found our hotel and dropped our bags. It was sunny and warm (but not hot, unless you were walking in it), and I calculated we walked 6.7 miles. We saw The Vessel, walked the High Line, visited Little Island Park and the Whitney Art Museum, and had dinner at Joseph Banks, where we often eat (it's easy to get a table before 6pm, which worked out well for us). On the way back we stopped at a photography art museum, which is always great.

Monday morning we had breakfast at a local diner, then went back to the hotel to check out and leave our bags at the desk. Then we walked up to Central Park. Stopped in Grand Central and a church on the way up. We just kinda wandered the park for a couple of hours. When it was time to start heading back down, I needed a map because I kept getting turned around and heading off the wrong way. Finally got it sorted out, and stopped at a cart for hot dogs. Should have done that more often - $12 for dogs and bottled water in the park, or $80 for burgers and beer in a restaurant?

So we made it back down to the hotel and got our bags. Met our Nigerian friend and set off for the train station. Got to the airport with no trouble and flew home. We were in New York City for exactly 24 hours.


"The Vessel" Art or architecture? Yes.


"Old Tree", by Pamela Rosenkranz

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Last June, I went to New York for a few days, just to look around with my camera. Street photography, mostly, but there was some “urban geometry.” Unfortunately, when I got home, one of my cards was missing. I switch cards every day or two, just in case there’s a problem with a card, or if my camera gets stolen, or something like that. But when I got home, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I figured it must have gotten pulled out of my bag when pulling something else out, and I didn’t hear it fall to the floor. It was disappointing, but I was able to let it go. Mainly because I didn’t know what was on it, for the most part.

I flew out on a Wednesday, and the photos were of Wednesday afternoon and evening. That was a six-mile walk, then after dark I took a two-mile walk to Times Square and back. The only thing I could remember shooting for sure was when I was sitting in a bar while it rained. And there was one really boring part of the walk with nothing to see.

But on a recent trip, I discovered the missing card in a pocket of my bag. So now I can see what I shot that day. And I’m very happy I found them!

I’ll start off with this gem. They seem embarrassed for someone…


In the middle of my walk, I decided to stop in a bar for a drink. While sitting there, it started raining. I trained my camera on the door…


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The first place I went to on Thursday, was The Vessel. It's essentially a big sculpture that you can walk up. It is shaped like a vase, and made of walkways and stairs.


I didn't get a very good photo of it. I was looking for the artistic shots...

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There's a four-level shopping mall across the street, in 30 Hudson Yards (which is where the previous photo was taken from). 30 Hundson Yards is the 6th tallest building in New York, and they have an observation deck, so I went up.


It looks like this.

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Grand Central Terminal is another legendary, iconic, beautiful and... grand place.


It's big! Look at those tiny people along the railings in the distance.

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Frank Lloyd Wright's 1936 masterpiece, a summer home for the Kaufmann family.


It is so beautiful! It's hard for photos to do it justice, but the main idea is all those tan, horizontal terraces, balanced out by the vertical stone columns. And the terraces seem to float in the air.

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Francis Bannerman was born in 1851. As a teen, he made money pulling scrap metal out of the Hudson, in New York City. After the Civil War he started buying military surplus. He made quite a bit of money doing this, over the years. His warehouse in Brooklyn couldn't safely accommodate the amount of munitions, so in 1900, he bought Pollepel Island, in the Hudson near Beacon.



He constructed warehouses, and eventually a residence and this castle. Bannerman was very cheap (he was Scottish!), and refused to hire an architect. He studied designs of castles and drew his own plans. Well, they weren't plans so much as sketches of what he wanted the buildings to look like. He turned these sketches over to the masons, who were left to build. But they didn't understand construction, only the visuals. They say there is not a right angle in the building.



The powder house indeed exploded, in 1920. The island was abandoned by 1930. The castle was destroyed by fire in 1969. The building had been supported by the interior walls and floors, and when they burned, the building remained on the verge of collapse, until the support beams were added in 2014, though I suppose it is still on the verge of collapse.


The residence, where Bannerman lived with his wife, until his death in 1918, whence construction on the island was halted.


There's an engineering term for this kind of drawing. "Cocktail napkin sketch."

Bannerman had an interest in military equipment, and he sold the surplus as memorabilia as well as functional equipment, and he often sold some back to the US Army. His catalogs were quite informational, and were useful in their own right as a sort of text book.


The view to the east, across the Hudson.

We left on Wednesday, to drive to New York, to see Cindy's son and daughter-in-law. We hadn't seen them since before the pandemic. We always went out there every two years, so it's been four years since we'd been to New York, and three since we'd seen them. On top of that, I had been itching to see the city for a couple of years.

For years, we'd been talking about going through Pennsylvania, to see sites relating to Cindy's ancestors, so we decided to drive out, and go through that area. It would have been too much, to fly to NY and rent a car to drive back to mid-PA, so we just drove it. And guess what! Record gas prices! *sigh*

So Wednesday, we left Wisconsin and went through Illinois and into Indiana with a slight detour to a restaurant at a distillery just over the border in Michigan. Then back to Indiana, across Ohio, and we stayed the night just north of Pittsburgh. A boring drive all the way.

Pennsylvania is pretty. The western part of the state is forested and mountainous. The central part farmland with rolling hills. We found her family's homestead, and walked around a bit to take photos. We were kinda hoping someone would be home to answer a couple of questions (like, "is that it?"). Then we went to a cemetery where the woman is buried, who first came to the new world, and founded a town. It was the first time I'd seen markers by the stones for the Revolutionary War. The nearest place for lunch was over the border into Maryland, so we marked off another new state that we'd been in. Then we drove to my cousin's place. He and his wife showed us around, then they took us to dinner. We stayed at their place.

Friday, we drove to New York, with a stop in PA at a waterfall. The kids moved from the city out to Beacon last year, so we got to see their new place. They also adopted new pups since then, so we got to meet them. Blanche was a nervous sort, and she only allowed me to pet her a couple of times. Suzy Lee didn't let us get near her. She was never happy with us being in the house.

Saturday morning we all went to a special tour at the Dia Beacon art museum. In the afternoon we walked around town with Mike. After dinner we went back to their place and had some drinks and played cards. Sunday, Mike took us on a tour of a small island in the Hudson.

We went out to eat a lot. When you're not at home, you eat out. And restaurant portions are not small. It was Sunday before I was able to reduce my food intake a little, because we did brunch, instead of both breakfast and lunch. Of course that was the one meal where my chosen menu item turned out to be not very filling, for a change (no complaints, though). There was a lot of drink too. I'd kinda had enough by the end of the weekend.

Monday, we were supposed to take the train into New York City. I had waited over a year for this, but the weather forecast was for storms. I figured we see the Guggenheim, maybe a quick visit to the nearby Met. Then find lunch and walk around a bit. What I most wanted to do was walk and shoot photos. Then it would rain for the rest of the day, and we would be wet, cold and miserable. So we canceled. I watched the radar in the afternoon, and the rain seemed to split around Manhattan. I did hear they got some rain, but not a huge amount. Later on, I realized we could have gone anyway, and just come home at the point where we did get too wet.

I was trying to find alternate ideas. The rain would arrive later in Connecticut, but it would take us more time to get there, plus I wasn't sure what we could see there. Some communities farther up in New York, like Woodstock? Still with the rain. Philadelphia (I hear there's a good art museum there)? No, the rain would be even worse. So we stayed in Beacon. There is a large sculpture park in the area, so we spent the morning there. Back in Beacon, we had lunch, and then walked up and down Main Street for a while. The rain didn't come until after we got back to our place, and it wasn't that hard. We had dinner with the kids in the evening and said goodbye. Cindy and I hung out at our Airbnb and listed to LP's. The owner had a large collection of old records in the room.

Tuesday morning, I'd wanted to get a quick and light breakfast at the bagel shop, before we hit the road, but they were closed to due staffing issues. The kids had recommended the doughnut shop, but they're only open on weekends. So we ate at the diner (again), and were on the road by 8:00. Google said that would put us at our destination by 3:00, but we got there before 2:30, early enough to get bumped up to an earlier tour. That was Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. It's a beautiful place, and we took tons of photos, which won't do it justice, and won't look anywhere near as nice as the ones in the book we bought. And we took a one-mile walk around the grounds. Then we drove into Pittsburgh for dinner, and took a walk around there too. Hotel at the same place as on the way over. We were tired and went to bed earlyish, and we slept in a bit too.

Wednesday, we retraced our steps out of PA with the long boring drive across Ohio and Indiana, with a stop for dinner at the place in Michigan. Despite being around rush hour, we had little trouble around Chicago, and arrived home around 6:30.

On Sunday, the four of us walked over to the Bluebird Cafe for an excellent brunch.



Then Cyn and I decided to walk downtown. We thought we'd see how far we could get. We got all the way down.


We first came to Grace Church.

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And then we went home.

We went to NYC this weekend. We wanted to pay a visit to Mike and Jill (my stepson and his fiancee) before their wedding in October.

We went out on Friday. We were supposed to get out there late afternoon and have dinner with Mike and Jill, but our departure was delayed from 1:30 to 5:30, due to bad weather at LaGuardia. We ended up having dinner after 10:00, and dessert after midnight. Mike made a great... forget what it was called... noodles, sausage, green things... sorry. And then an awesome caramel pudding. So with all that food in me that late, I couldn't get to sleep. It was getting light out before I really fell soundly asleep. Our hotel room was decent, but there were shared bathrooms. But it was relatively inexpensive.

The next day they took us out for brunch, and then Cindy and I went to MOMA. We saw pretty much the whole thing, though we breezed through most of it pretty quickly. Saw "The Starry Night", "Christina's World", "The Persistence of Memory", plus Hopper, Mondrian, Monet, Magritte, Rousseau, Picasso, Pollock, etc. They also had photographers - Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Edward Steichen, Harold Edgerton, William Wegman...

We walked through the corner of Central Park for a bit. The weather was great. Warm in the sun, cool in the shade. We met Mike and Jill at a "Wisconsin" restaurant down in the West Village. Didn't seem at all Wisconsiny, but I did see a local gin on the menu. The place was cozy. They kick out the afternoon bargoers at 6:00, and begin dinners. There were only seven or eight tables, in addition to about that many seats at the bar, and we got the only table for four. Very good food.

Then back to Mike's and Jill's to hang out and play some games. Brunch again in the morning.

For the afternoon, Cyn and I walked south. We went down Broadway through Soho, and ended up at the World Trade Center and Ground Zero. Then down to Battery Park for a view of the Statue of Liberty. We stopped for a drink in the oldest surviving building in Manhattan (we found out later). George Washington had his farewell feast there (or something like that), after the Revolutionary War had ended.

Then we spent 70 minutes trying to get back to Mike's. It should have been a half hour trip by subway, but we couldn't figure out where to find one that would take us. We called Mike, but still had to walk half the way back before getting the subway. We could have gotten back quicker if we'd just walked the whole way straight back, rather than wandering and backtracking, and checking maps and calling Mike, going into the wrong stations, and so on. I ended up spending $18 for the weekend, to ride the subway three times. A single-ride ticket only costs $2.75. It was especially frustrating because after being there twice before, I thought I was getting the hang of it.

Then we got a quick supper and a taxi to the airport.