"If your dreams don't scare you.....they aren't big enough"
- Leanne Haughian
- Nov 23, 2017
- 3 min read
NYC We were not sure if we were going to stop here….well because its New York City and we are driving a 20ft van and overnight parking can be tricky. We didn’t want to regret going around. One of the reasons for this trip is to experience everything we can, the easy and the hard. In doing some research, the best was is either by tour bus or head out on foot. We were able to find a place out of the inner city to park Morrie for free for the day. So we hoped the north Metro train. I think our experience was richer for getting uncomfortable with New York, navigating the subway, walking through the streets, having to ask locals questions. I love this lower picture! We would see these signs all over the state on peoples lawns. It seems that things arent always as they appear. That love and kindness are everywhere!
But I need to talk about our first NY experience. We stayed in White Plains a subdivision of NY just north of the Bronx. Our usual go to is to look on gps for a park and see if there is parking for the night. Parking in NY is dicey let alone overnight parking. The first park we found was in a “well to do” neighborhood. But the park was nice and there were no signs saying “no parking”. So after walking to the train station to see how close it was we decided to stay the night. (The side picture is out our window looking at our neighbors for the night!)
It seemed good until about 4:45am when we hear a knock at the van door. It was the NYPD, they were checking us out…obviously! The officer checked our id’s and heard our story. He wanted to know if we had jobs at home and what our plans were for tomorrow. Hearing that we were pretty innocently just staying here before we parked at the train station tomorrow morning, he let us stay for a few more hours. But cautioned that we leave before day break as the residents will likely be calling him back. He was surprised that this was were we chose to sleep for the night, but was very reasonable.
The NY subway is actually quiet easy to navigate and locals are so friendly and willing to help. Our ride into Manhattan was about 45 minutes. We arrived at Grand Central Station. Navigating out of the station was almost the hardest part!! We spend all day walking the streets. We saw Rockefeller Center and walked through(home to The Tonight Show, SNL and many other tv shows), Radio City, Time Square, Broadway, Central Park, Empire State Building… in fact we had a beer at the base of the Empire State Building and chatted with a local who invited us to a Dead and Company show at Madison Square Gardens (tribute to the Grateful Dead) and gave us some good insight into an iconic pizza joint in Brooklyn. So we again hopped on the subway and got closer to Brooklyn so we could walk across the bridge and try to find this pizza joint. We weren’t successful getting into the pizza place but enjoyed the experience nonetheless.
We saw the Statue of Liberty from the bridge at sunset and again at night, it was a pretty surreal experience. It’s funny how much American culture affects us just from television and movies.
If you look really close in the last photo you can see the Statue of Liberty in the skyline!
We did get a slice of pizza later that night. To me the cities we visit I want to experience the people, the culture and the community. Walking through the streets, shuffling through traffic, the vendors on the streets with their stands selling the “dirty water dogs” and pretzels… I almost broke down and bought a dog from a vendor. But at one point I was standing over the sewer drain and had the most disgusting smell of old hotdog water and stale urine that quickly changed my mind. This is the travel that we want to experience.
At night the streets that you walked through earlier that day have changed with the rise of the moon. We actually got lost getting back to Grand Central just because it looks so different at night. I find it interesting that a city as grand in appearance has garbage pouring into the streets by night. It speaks volumes for our throw away society, we spend all this time creating these impressive buildings and then clutter the ground with our waste. Overall New York was a wonderful experience but it is busting at the seams, or maybe I'm just a small town girl!
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