Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e had planned to go to a rather unique diner after skating at Bryant Park during our trip to Manhattan at Christmastime.  Actually, we had each of our meals planned for our entire trip, even our breakfasts.  After skating at Bryant park, we walked the few blocks to this diner on Broadway only to find that the line to get into the diner was wrapped around the building and then, as we peered around the corner, we noticed the line was more than a block long!  Instead of waiting on that very long line in the brutal wind and frigid temperatures, we headed to Junior's diner one or two blocks closer to Times Square.  We had only a 10 minute wait there so we had breakfast there.   Skating at Bryant Park was later than our skating reservation at Rockefeller Center so, by the time we left Bryant Park, we were well into the busy time for breakfast.  I was hoping we would still be early enough to avoid the big crowds but we were not!  Fortunately, I had a few restaurants in mind as backups t

This blog entry consists mostly of photos of windows we saw on Fifth Avenue.  We did some window shopping, however, I should mention that we did quite a bit of shopping in quite a few stores on Fifth Avenue during our stay in Manhattan too.   I'll cover our disappointments in another blog entry but I have to add a bit about our disappointments here in this blog entry since window shopping, in general, is something that left us quite disappointed during this trip thanks to Sak's Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor.  (Plus, I'm still a bit bitter about being infected with COVID yet again due to this trip so I'm left with a lot of bad feelings about this trip... a lot of bad, bitter feelings.) First, Lord & Taylor is now gone so their windows and Christmas decorations were sorely missed.  Their Christmas window displays were always among the best on Fifth Avenue.  Sak's Fifth Avenue also used to be among the best but, this year, Sak's seems to have given up on

O n one of our mornings while in Manhattan with Kenzie and Lukey, we went to breakfast across the street from Grand Central Terminal at a place called Pershing Square.  This is perhaps our favorite breakfast spot and, as usual, we had an exceptional breakfast on this morning too.  Even Lukey and Kenzie were impressed with both the food and the service and that is saying something since we were there for perhaps the most informal meal of the day, breakfast.  After breakfast, we walked across 42nd Street and into Grand Central Terminal so I could show the kids one of my favorite train stations.  The kids enjoy visiting train stations so this was a good place for a short tour.   In the photo below, we are walking across 42nd Street to one of the entrances to Grand Central Terminal.  This is probably my favorite entrance because it leads directly into Vanderbilt Hall and then directly into the center of the Main Concourse.   Below, we are heading toward Vanderbilt Hall so this would be the

I shot quite a few photos while in Manhattan last week but a significant portion of these photos were shot atop the Empire State Building.  I decided to preview a couple of these photos and since they looked so good, I will share them here in this blog entry before I write about our visit to the famous observation deck towering above midtown Manhattan. To be honest, when I first previewed and sorted my photos from the trip, I was a bit disappointed by the photos I shot at the Empire State Building.  Even when I was shooting the photos, I was a bit uncertain about how good they would be for quite a few very good reasons.   First, it was frigid up there so I was shivering and distracted.  It is hard to stay focused and think clearly when you are being blasted by frigid air and wind.   As you would expect at this altitude (1,050 feet),  the wind was whipping so much that I had to brace myself to keep from wobbling and swaying in the wind...  I had no tripod since they are not allowed at

W hen we traveled to Manhattan from Vermont, we were supposed to arrive in Penn Station on Amtrak and the kids (mostly Lukey) were really looking forward to pulling into this station and riding the escalator up to the new main train hall.  Unfortunately, our Amtrak train was cancelled altogether due to flooding in Vermont so we had to drive down to Manhattan instead which meant that the kids missed out on their train ride on Amtrak as well as seeing Penn Station, especially the new train hall at Penn Station. On our second day in Manhattan, we found that even the Manhattan subway system was trying to recover from flooding.  This caused some transportation issues for us. We had a reservation for a visit at a specific time at the Museum of Natural History but we couldn't get there in time due to these subway problems.  On our way up to the museum, we only got as far as Columbus Circle (59th Street) but we had only minutes left to get to our reservation at the museum (81st Street).  N

This is another blog entry with a lot of photos and a short video down at the bottom of the page. N ot only did Gee and Kenzie get to skate at Rockefeller Center but we also scheduled an early morning skating session at Bryant Park.  Of course, Lukey was supposed to skate with them on both days but he was on crutches with a broken foot so he stuck with me during the skating sessions.   This session at Bryant Park wasn't as early as the session we had previously at Rockefeller Center but it was their earliest session of the day for Bryant Park.  We figured that the crowd would be thinner earlier in the morning plus the ice would be best first thing in the morning.  The temperatures reached into the 40s during the day while we were there which isn't so great for ice, however, the ice would have a chance to freeze well through the night when nobody was skating on it and the temperatures were down around freezing again.  By the end of the day, both rinks had been soft with puddles