09.22.07
Soggy in Central Park
So Bela and I aren’t huge fans of the city life, which got confirmed once again as we came into the city last night. Apparently NY highways are as confusing as humanly possible. There are many businesses/restaurants on one side of the road as usual but instead of having an exit to get to most of them you have to take an exit and do a U-y to get back on the other side of the road. So we found our hotel in New Jersey fairly easily by doing just 1 U-y. This morning we went to find our next hotel closer to Yankee Stadium and we ended up driving around in circles for a 1/2 hour. Thank goodness we had our laptop with a streets/maps program on it, that we ended up referencing after our first missed exit (that evil ogden ave!) so we crossed the george washington bridge i think 3 times… with many unplanned U-ys for fun. We finally figured out where we were and found the hidden roads that led us to our hotel. (and i still think they are hidden no matter what they say).
Our hotel is in the Bronx, which could be a little scary. But we’re not too scared considering the police station is literally next door. After a bit of confusion we were able to leave the car at the hotel and took a cab down to central park. The driver was pretty cool and gave us a bit of a tour – showing us the subway stop, yankee stadium (new and current) as well as our route we’d take to the game tomorrow for no extra charge (we tipped him well). We’d noticed it was a bit foggy when we were driving around in the morning (which helped us decide what we wanted to do as most of our options included sightseeing), but what we didn’t know is that the fog was actually rain clouds. The driver dropped us off at 72nd st entrance to Central Park since that didn’t require being able to see up.
Most of the things i wanted to visit were due to movies being shot here. The Bow bridge was used in “Keeping the faith” and i think “You’ve got mail” and the Mall area was used in “maid in manhattan” so being the chic flic queen i convinced bela to wander around with me, i also bribed him with bouldering and geocaching. We started off near Strawberry fields where the imagine mosaic is located. We walked to the Bethesda Fountain and it started to sprinkle. We continued on to Bow Bridge where it promptly started to rain pretty hard. We watched a bridal party sprint for cover, which was kind of entertaining. We waited out the rain under a willow tree for a while and eventually made a run for it as it started to let up. We were both pretty wet and thought maybe we’d hit a museum, but they were pretty pricey and looked way too busy so we opted to get breakfast and dry off.
Once semi-dry we headed back to the park to try to geocache. My phone had died so we had a hard time figuring out where exactly the caches were located. I took us on the wrong side of the lake for one and we got within range of another, but without the info on my phone we gave up. We also had forgotten our bouldering info, so we were getting a bit tired of walking around in central park. We headed to the mall for one last stroll through the park.
We decided to take the subway back, which wasn’t too bad. The driver guy had given us a good idea of what we needed to know about which trains. And our trusty laptop also came in handy after we got off the train to figure out where the heck we were. We walked back to the hotel and were glad to be dry!
We’re off to the Yankee game tomorrow then home early on monday!