Scattered Thoughts . . .

S heila and I kept a few things about our plans for our time in Manhattan a surprise for Lukey and Kenzie.  One of these surprises was that, unbeknownst to Lukey and Kenzie, we had previously purchased tickets to visit not just the common observation deck but the 80th, 86th and 102nd floors of the Empire State Building which includes the topmost small, enclosed observation deck.   When we surprised these two grandchildren with this Christmas trip back on Halloween (see this blog post ), one of the many tickets we had gifted to them was for the Empire State Building.  At the time, we made it clear that, unfortunately, we would not have time to go up to the observation deck because it will be the busy Christmas season with long lines so it would take up far too much of our valuable time.  Regardless, they still seemed excited to be seeing this monumental building from the street.  I put their minds at ease explaining that, at the very least, we could see what the lobby looks like just li

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