New Year in the Big Apple
Lily and I had a wonderful time in New York over the New Year’s holiday. Besides catching up with her family, we got a chance to do a bit of sightseeing. We saw the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier that served in WWII and Vietnam. It was also involved in the early space race retrieving astronauts after they had returned to earth. The Intrepid is also home to an impressive aircraft collection and provided an opportunity to get up close and personal with a retired space shuttle, the first prototype of the whole program, the Enterprise.
While we were in Manhattan, we got a chance to explore the city for the first time in several years. Times Square was insanely busy, even the day before the ball was dropped. We had originally intended to see a Broadway show, but ended up taking a trip around the island on the Circle Line instead. New York looks very different from the water, and we got a chance to imagine what the immigrants would have experienced as we sailed by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
Another aviation destination included the Cradle of Aviation museum on Long Island. It is located at the site where Charles Lindbergh took off on his trans-Atlantic flight. The museum is staffed by a lot of retired Grumman employees and focuses largely on the products of that company. At both the USS Intrepid and the Cradle of Aviation museum I got a chance to see F-14’s on static display. My twelve-year-old “Top Gun” loving self would have been very jealous. Just for good measure I crashed the space shuttle three times on a computer simulated reentry mission. With a record like that it is probably a good thing that I never ended up as an astronaut.
Our final museum stop was the Cold Spring Harbor whaling museum. We learned a lot. The museum is very well done. It does a very good job of presenting the fascinating history of 19th century whaling without glorifying the practice. It was honest about the toll it took on nature and the people who did it. It also helped make the book Moby Dick make far more sense. Growing up in the Midwest, I must admit that I never really had the context to understand what Melville was talking about.
The trip home went much more smoothly than the flight out. We had great service on Southwest and enjoyed our stopover at Baltimore before traveling on to St. Louis. This was a good vacation and a fun way to start the new year. That said, it was still nice to get back home to Dexter last night and sleep in our own bed for the first time in two weeks.
