Day 2 dawned miserable. Rainy and chilly. So we decided to get some indoor touristing out of the way. We hit the subway for the first time and rode the uptown C train from the 50 Street Station to the American Museum of Natural History. The subway stopped in the basement of the museum. In the lobby were probably 1,000 people in line for tickets. The museum probably loves cold and rainy weather. Also in the lobby was a super-tall skeleton of a barosaurus.
The coolest things in the museum, of course, are the dinosaur exhibits.
I told T. rex all about the front-pocket-wallet craze that’s sweeping America. He was impressed.
An allosaurus feeding on an apatosaurus.
Duckbilled dinos. Anyone who’s watched Dinosaur Train would recognize every dinosaur in the museum.
It took a couple of hours to make our way through the dinosaurs and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives and we were growing weary of the museum. The place is massive, like five Wal-Mart Supercenters stacked on top of each other. So we bolted.
We decided that despite the rain we didn’t want to undertake any more inside activities, so we went across the street into Central Park. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle as we wandered through the south end of the park. Gina stopped in a few places to model her beige rain jacket and baby blue backpack.
We made our way down to the section named Strawberry Fields in honor of John Lennon who was slain across the street at the Dakota apartments. The tan building in the background of the photo. From what I understand, the Imagine memorial is a big draw and is often covered with flowers and other hippie stuff. I guess the rain kept the crowds down the day we were there. Although enough people were around that I could never get a shot without people in it.
Just past the Imagine mosaic we spotted this hawk going to town on a bird he had killed. Several hawks call Central Park home and a lot of people follow their daily doings.
We wended our way down to the Mall and found it mostly deserted.
About halfway down the Mall this sax player blew romantic tunes to mostly no one. As we walked along it felt like the closing scene of a Sex And The City episode. We stopped at the Central Park souvenir store and got a couple things and then walked out the south end of the park onto Sixth Avenue.
New York is full of these electronics stores that sell everything from high-end digital cameras and lap-top computers to the cheesy I ♥ New York clothing items. They fill their windows with wonderful collages of color and texture … or something.
It turns out the iPhone is very handy in NYC. There are dozens of NYC specific apps, including ones where you put in where you are and where you want to go and it returns directions including what subway trains or buses to use. Little Rock has zero apps devoted to it. On our walk back from Central Park we were using the Starbucks app to find, you guessed it, a Starbucks. We’re standing on a street corner like a couple of rubes studying out iPhones and pointing up and down the street as we discuss which way we should go. We decided to head left and turned in that direction and Gina noticed a window full of people sitting and drinking from Starbucks cups. We looked up to see what this place was and it was the Starbucks we couldn’t figure out how to get to.
After getting a couple $4 coffees we headed down Sixth to Rockefeller Center where I failed to take one decent picture. It was getting close to dark so we headed back the hotel, which was three blocks away.
After such a long walk, we were hungry for some quality white-tablecloth-type dining. Gina got a us a reservation at Keen’s Steakhouse on West 36th Street, a 120-year-old restaurant with the largest churchwarden pipe collection in the world, they say. The ceilings and walls are lined with them. That’s where I got the Legendary Muttonchop™ you see above. It was very, very good. I ate the whole thing, which must have been about 2 lbs. Then I ate about a quarter of Gina’s filet mignon. The meat sweats hit me hard by the time I was done. We had a couple glasses of really good wine, too. I’m surprised I didn’t have a gout attack on the way out the door. We also set a new record in the Most Expensive Restaurant Visit category.
Entrance to Keen’s bar.
We took the subway to the restaurant but decided to walk back to the hotel, which was a little under a mile away. It gave us a chance to see Times Square yet again.