Best New York Day Ever

We hike cities. That's what Bruce and I do for our holidays. Sure we visit museums and other attractions, but, mostly, we hike.

Happy bee on the Hudson River Park. The HRP was the one thing we saw this trip that we had never seen before . It is a wonderful public space with lots of lawns and gardens, play grounds, recreational facilities and dog parks. The dog parks were our favourite.

Today, the weather held, so we hiked from Chelsea to the south end of the city and back again.

Traffic on 8th Avenue - morning rush hour - a mind-boggling amount of traffic moving very slowly.

We started with the Rubin museum, normally a peaceful place, but this time of year every NYC museum (except for the Frick) swarms with school children. The animated chatter of high-pitched voices did not reach, thankfully, to the fifth floor, where we really enjoyed Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full-Frame. 

With a fortifying dose under our belts of Himalayan artwork and several reverential minutes in a buddhist temple shrine replica (until the children showed up), we headed south down 6th Ave, keeping the new World Trade Tower in our sites.

We came, after walking for about forty minutes and almost without warning, to the teeming, crammed, crowded, noisy, somewhat upsetting environs of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. 

A man accosted us - I think because he wanted to sell us a book - and started taking us through a picture book showing the attack and the aftermath. It was all a little too much. I did a cut and run, looking for the quieter streets of the financial district. 

We stopped at Jim Brady's tavern - Diamond Jim Brady - on Maiden Lane and enjoyed a really tasty meal for a reasonable price, though, as always, the portions were huge and everything was salty.

There are three chicken breasts under that slab of bread.

Blackened Thai Salmon salad with peanut sauce.

The original plan was that we would walk down to the south end of the city and take the subway back to Chelsea. But, while we were on our way back uptown, we found the Hudson River Park, running parallel to West Street (which, for pedestrians, is an oppressive in-city highway). The park was so compellingly pleasant we just let it carry us all the way to W 20th Street, where we joined a crowd of intrepid fellow pedestrians who crossed West Street, for safety, en masse (even with the light, I'm never confident of the social covenant with cars).

We noted on our way a very pleasant little cafe where you can sit by the Hudson surrounded by green space and enjoy a refreshing beverage. But, today, we were footsore and anxious to get back to the hotel before totally relaxing, which, as illustrated by Bruce, is what we are doing now.

That's a George Dickel whiskey; we're in the back patio of our hotel.

Best New York day, ever.

Thanks for reading!

Karen