Road Trip Diaries

When we woke up, Phoenix had left the apartment, leaving her bags with the hotel. We didn't really have a plan for the day, but we knew we had to check out and then make use of eight hours or so.

I got up before Debbie, showered and dressed, then went out to buy a suitcase. Yes, our shopping exceeded the space we had left for it.

I helped as far as I could with the packing, but it reached a point where Debbie was best equipped to finish it by herself. I went downstairs to the hotel's guest lounge, with its wired Internet access. I wish I'd found that earlier.

Soon, Debbie summoned me back to the room, we took our bags downstairs, checked out, and booked a car to the airport for the evening.

We had formulated a plan, which involved the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn, and a walk around Brooklyn Heights.

First, we got breakfast at the Brooklyn Diner, not in Brooklyn at all, but a few blocks from the hotel in uptown Manhattan. Astonishingly, we were too early for the lunch menu, so Debbie had a bagel and I had poached eggs.

We had a look around the Time Warner building, which was being built last time we visited New York. Indeed the building site view probably kept the price of our room down. Now it is a concert venue and an upscale shopping mall, with a wholefood supermarket downstairs. The supermarket looks and smells like a French hypermarket (a mixture of melons and pungent cheese), and the shop is divided half and half into groceries that you might cook with, and foods that you might buy to eat during your lunch hour. It has an impressive view of Columbus Circle.

We got onto the subway at Columbus circle, and emerged in Brooklyn by another statue of Columbus. They love the fella! This was outside the New York State supreme court.

We oriented ourselves, and found our way to the New York Transit Museum. It was really interesting, explaining how the various tunnels were built — sometimes by simply digging a trench in the road and covering it up again, and sometimes using dangerous deep mining techniques. Welsh and Cornish immigrants with mining skills suddenly found themselves in demand.

The museum's major exhibit is its collection of old subway carriages (or "cars" as they like to call them). Although of course we couldn't appreciate the nostalgic value of this, it was interesting to read the period adverts, and to see how the design shifted from the decorative to the sparse and functional (and ugly) as the 20s became the 60s.

Back outside, we contemplated our hunger, and decided to wander around Brooklyn Heights and pop into somewhere that seemed nice. Brooklyn Heights is the most upscale part of Brooklyn, according to the guidebooks, and a peek at the prices in the local estate agents' (or "realtors") windows confirmed it.

We strolled South down Court Street, then came around the block and walked back North along residential Clinton St, where neighbours were chatting to each other and chivvying their children along. On Atlantic Avenue, we finally decided on a late lunch, at the Waterfalls Restaurant, a middle eastern place, where I had shish kebab with babaghanooj and Debbie had falafels with hummous, both of which came with pitta and seasoned salad. It was delicious, filling, friendly, and the whole lot came to under $10.

We walked on towards the river, only to find ourselves faced with a forbidding industrial quay entrance, and the Brooklyn Expressway. We backtracked, went North a few blocks, and tried again. This brought us out on Brooklyn Heights Promenade, passing some interesting buildings on the way, including one which once housed W.H. Auden, who I didn't know had emigrated (not that I am by any means a poetry scholar).

The promenade has a fantastic view of Manhattan. We took to Brooklyn Heights and had already discussed how if we came back to New York, and apartment in Brooklyn might be nice. Now we joked about renting an apartment overlooking the promenade. I shudder to think how much that might cost.

I believe that many of the archetypal Sept. 11th shots were taken from this perspective, and that's not surprising since I spotted at least five people snapping away with cameras in the short time we were there.

The short walk back to the subway took us past some more interesting buildings, including one wooden building that reminded us of the 1820s houses in Salem, Massachusetts.

We returned to Manhattan, where we spent some time pursuing skincare products requested by Steve. Apparently they do moisturiser for men nowadays. The sticking point was aftershave. Even after resolving cultural differences, where the assistants insisted it was "cologne" even though the sampler bottle clearly said "aftershave", the splash-on version of the particular type Steve wanted was nowhere to be found, except as a half-empty sampler.

Eventually, we gave up. Debbie was lured into an Old Navy shop, and I think we'd have been in there for much longer if it weren't for the fact that we had limited room in the luggage to play with. She used the excuse that she'd stained her top, and had to have a clean one for the plane journey. While we were in there, Old Navy flattered me into buying a shirt, by labelling the one that fit as "medium". It was light and short-sleeved meaning that it would have minimal luggage impact.

We still had some time to kill before our car to the airport. We took the subway to 50th St. and walked the remaining 5 blocks, stopping to share a cheesecake, slowly, at a tourist trap diner on Broadway. I don't know whether the waitress had studied New York archetypes carefully, and found that exhaggerating them got good tips, or whether she'd been recruited on the strength of these characteristics, but she ticked all the boxes and got a hefty tip as a result (it helped that we needed to deplete our cache of currency).

We killed the remaining half hour or so by treating some shops as museums, then returned to the hotel where Phoenix was waiting for us. We asked whether our driver would come in for us, or whether we needed to wait outside. We were told he would come in.

Five minutes past the allotted time, one of the hotel receptionists asked "Are you waiting for a car?". "Yes." "I think it's waiting outside."  The car had been there 20 minutes. It didn't matter to us, because we'd arranged a fixed fare.

The drive to JFK was interesting because our driver knew the roads, and we drove alongside the expressway, moving faster than its traffic, for quite a stretch of the way. We had Latin American music as background.

At one point, at a red light on Queens Boulevard, a car nearby turned down its hip-hop so that a back seat passenger could shout across to the girl in the next car. We heard his half of the conversation: "Yo, what's your name?", "Sharon? Ya got a number Sharon? I wanna invite you to my show tomorrow night." "Cool, shout it out and I'll put it in my phone."

Fast, impressive work, and I hope he got the whole number, because as he was confirming it, the lights changed and off everyone went.

Apart from seeing an enormous man in the terminal, who we prayed would not be seated next to us, and wasn't, the journey home was uneventful, mostly involving sleep. I slept so much that I didn't have time to watch in-flight video, read a book, or play a game. Only sleep. So, that's the end of this diary until we go on another journey.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under NYC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.