Hillbillies And The City – Day 1

For years Gina agitated for a New York City vacation and this year, with my characteristic magnanimity, I decided to grant her wish. (Your B.S. detector should be screaming right now.) Several people expressed surprise that I would go to New York for a vacation. I guess because I’m usually a national park/driving cross country kind of guy. But NYC is one of those places everyone should see, right? Also I knew NYC would be a fantastic place to take photos, so I got pretty excited about going. The only time I’d been in the East Coast Megalopolis was way back in the summer after 8th grade when I went to Washington, D.C., to visit relatives for a few weeks.

I’m not big on flying. I realize rationally that flying is safer than driving and all that, but man wasn’t meant to fly. He was meant to drive 85 mph on an interstate. The last time I flew was in 1997 on business thing and it was a short flight from Little Rock to Dallas. This trip to NYC was going to involve real flying, you know, changing planes and layovers and security hassles. Even though I don’t like being in an airplane, I do like to look out the window and the passing terrain below. Unfortunately, most of the trip both going and coming was done over and through cloudy skies. I was hoping to get some interesting photos out the plane window, but most were really blah.

Much of the trip promised to be very novel to me and it was, like the international Coke™ I was served on the plane between Chicago and NYC. We flew into LaGuardia in Queens and we approached the city from the south out over the ocean and our windows were on the east side of the plane, so all we got to see from the air was Long Island. The plane finally swung around to land heading south and we got about two minutes of a view of the city from low altitude. So no pictures.

We hit the exit and jumped into a cab to take us to the Belvedere in mid-town Manhattan. The cab ride proved to be the first of several experiences that I’d never had before, but felt very familiar because of how heavily New York City features in popular entertainment. The cab ride should have been terrifying, but I totally knew the driver would have little command of English and drive like a bat out of hell through heavy traffic.

We checked into the hotel and this was the view from our 16th-floor window. We could see the reflections of the Times Square lights in the windows of the buildings across from us.

We immediately headed out for Times Square a couple blocks away. TS is, of course, amazing with all the giant video screens and flashing neon and hordes of tourists. But again, I’ve seen Times Square on TV dozens of times, including the whole New Years Eve thing. I had imagined it to be bigger than it is. In fact, one thing I hadn’t taken into account is that even though New York is this giant city with all the famous excesses, dimensions there seem physically small because there’s so little space in which to spread out. Yes, the buildings are tall and there’s no end to them, but the individual buildings have relatively small footprints and there’s no distance between anything. I’ve been in big cities, but the ones I’ve been to were in the south and west and mid-west, where space is not so precious and the buildings naturally demand more personal space. Manhattan is only 23 square miles with 1.8 million people. Dallas, with 1.2 million people, sprawls for 385 square miles. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we could walk to a lot of the stuff we wanted to see on the island.