Regards for the New Year. Back to posting four days into 2026, maybe with tales of Florida alligator tourism. The change of the year always brings me the same reaction: how did that number get so high? This time around, I wonder how is it that 1976, a good (mostly) year I remember fairly well for a number of reasons, was 50 years ago?
Orlando, Yuriko was surprised to learn, is an actual city. The day after Universal Epic Universe, we drove from our hotel near that park, past Orlando’s sizable downtown, and to the inner suburb of Winter Park. She marveled that the city had a presence besides the sprawl of the theme parks, which are at some distance from the Orlando CBD. Bet she isn’t the only person, upon leaving the theme park zone, with that reaction.
One could devise a pretty good multi-day visit to Orlando, to see its green spaces and historic sites and museums, and take in a few shops and restaurants and some live music, and never pay the Mouse or Comcast a dime. Maybe one day I will do such a visit, but the pull of the theme parks is pervasive. Even my businesses trips of yore (early 2000s) to central Florida tended to gravitate toward the parks. Why would you skip the theme parks? would be the reaction, even — and most importantly — among members of my family. For now, part of a day away from the Theme Park Industrial Complex will have to do.
I’d gotten wind of a tour boat ride on Winter Park’s small lakes that (1) wasn’t expensive and only about a hour long; (2) didn’t require reservations or a damned app or the like to access; and (3) most importantly, was something we could do sitting down, after a day of walking and more walking.
We made it for the noon tour. December 10 was as warm and clear a day in Winter Park as you could ask for, a reminder of why a couple of Victorian businessmen were able to found a town in central Florida and attract wealthy property buyers who aspired to escape the frozen North for a few months.
Our skipper for the tour.
Skipper Bob, let’s call him. He took us from the tour-boat dock on Lake Osceola through a couple of canals to Lake Mizell and Lake Virginia and then back, pointing out some of the posher estates and landmarks along the way, such as the posh boat houses that tend to come with such properties.
Bob also offered up some detail about the history of the area, most of it unfamiliar. I didn’t know, for example, that Fred Rogers was an alumnus of Rollins College, which occupies a sizable chunk of the Lake Virginia shore. I also learned that the college, even in our age of grossly inflated higher-ed tuition, outclasses most others in its high cost.
Out on the lakes, Bob revved up the engine from time to time, spurring the boat forward at a good clip. Wind famously blows long hair into a pleasantly billowing mass at such times, but under the warm sun and blue sky that day, even my shortish hair was picked up by the wind. Felt good.
I liked the passages through the canals. I don’t think I was alone in this.
In most of the rest of the country, winter had arrived. In Winter Park, named for the season it is most unlike, you can pass through the tightly packed greenery luxuriating in warm air.
You’re up close to the yards of more modest, but still high-value real estate. Everyone’s got a dock.
The vantage means views of the canopy above.
After the boat tour, we walked a few pleasant blocks along Morse Blvd., away from the lake. This handsome church, First United Methodist, didn’t look open. Too bad.
The city is fond of its peafowl, I understand.
The downtown shopping street in Winter Park is Park Ave. On one side of the street are the likes of Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine, Williams-Sonoma, Ocean Blue Galleries, D’Anne Mica, Fannie Hillman + Associates real estate, Current by John Craig men’s clothing, The Imperial on Park wine bar and Be On Park Fine Jewelry. Life Is Good (registered trademark) products are available on the street.
Across the street from the shops is Central Park. The developers were out, I think, to remind New Yorkers of home, but without the likelihood of snow or ice or blizzards like in ’88.
The Winter Park station on the SunRail commuter line is at the park, and a SunRail came while I was idling in the park. Amtrak stops there too.
The park was decorated for the holidays, of course. Including a phone booth.
A local tradition. You can call from the booth and leave a message for Santa Claus.
Decorating for Christmas this year meant a rapid set-up. We spent a fair number of hours on the 23rd making the living room ready for a tree – moving clutter, mostly. On Christmas Eve, I brought the tree in from the garage, and Ann mostly decorated it. Finishing touches, by me, were in progress even on the morning of Christmas Day, but since that moment in the life of our family doesn’t involve an early-morning rush downstairs by children anticipating Santa’s bounty any more, that was doable.
Ann did a fine job of decorating, in the style of our family: fill up the tree with a wide variety of glowing and glinting objects accumulated across the decades.
We got a late start on decorating for Christmas, though when I think about, decorating after the Solstice discourages the sort of front-loading of Christmas that a lot of people complain about, but which they do anyway.
We had a good reason for the late start: a drive to Florida and back, beginning on December 4 and ending on the 22nd. Not just to Florida, but as far as you can go in that state, at least by car, namely to Key West and back. Early to mid-December seemed like a good time to do such a thing, after any traveling people do for Thanksgiving but before the worst of the Christmas-New Year’s rush. A short shoulder season in other words, but a good one, with room rates not quite subject to surge pricing, and crowds thick in some high-volume tourist destinations, but not impossible.
Also, Florida has few mosquitoes this time of year. Not no mosquitoes, as we found out one day in the southern reaches of the peninsula, just a “bearable” number.
Sometime earlier this year, I got the idea that I wanted to take four long drives after turning 64. Four for 64, you could say. Doing so by the end of 2025 wasn’t part of the idea, but that’s how things worked out. The drive to Florida and back, by way of such places as Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga and Atlanta, totaled 3,682 miles. For all four trips since June, the total is about 14,300 miles.
That could be made to sound impressive, but in fact American men my age average more than that every year, about 15,000 miles, at least according to this source, which cites US DOT data. Younger men drive even more annually. Most of that is commuting, however. My commuting mileage by car has been exactly zero this year, and while I drive locally to stores and such, it couldn’t be more than a few thousand miles. So it seems clear that, as an American man, it was my duty to get out and drive.
When we headed south in early December, snow covered the ground all the way past Indianapolis, where we stopped for a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is part of a larger campus called Newfields – and better examined in summer, I think. But the museum is a good one, with a solid collection, especially 19th-century American and European works. Such as “Justitia,” a Morris & Co. work from the 1890s.
After overnighting south of Louisville, we diverted from I-65 and took smaller roads through southern Kentucky and into Tennessee to a holler in Jackson County, where we were the guests of dear friends. Tennessee musicians from those parts — some professional, others skilled amateurs — gathered on the the evening of Saturday the 6th, for one of the periodic jams in our friends’ barn, which houses no animals these days, but a small stage and some sound equipment and a fair number of folding chairs. A joyful jam it was. Food was potluck. I like to think we went to a hootenanny.
The road through the holler. By this point, no snow. We were trading cold for warmth. That was one of the goals of the trip. Maybe the main one.
From there it was mostly a straight shot down through Georgia on I-75 to Florida, and eventually US 27 to Orlando by way of non-coastal Florida places like Gainesville, Ocala and Lady Lake, a string of settlement less agricultural and less pastoral now than ever, more like an endless outer suburb. Heavy traffic is an invasive species in this part of Florida, surely as pythons are in damper parts of the state. Not just masses of cars and trucks, either, but also golf carts. We passed close enough to The Villages to see billboards advertising legal representation in the event of golf cart accidents. Carts, I’ve heard, provide transport in great numbers in that sprawl of a settlement.
The drive to and in Florida involved the usual North American mix of large and small roads, smooth and ragged, grid-like and irregular, though Florida cities tended toward the irregular (except for Key West), and as crowded as can be and as empty as can be. Snow lined the way up north, thinning out the further south we went, giving way to brown landscapes and bare trees. Then we came into greenery – evergreens and palms and even deciduous species turning color. We crossed mighty bridges over mighty rivers, small culverts over alligator haunts, and the string of bridges that make up the civil engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway (US 1). We crossed barely acknowledged borders and signs at the Florida visitor center on I-75 proclaiming The Free State of Florida.
Florida Man was out and about, weaving in and out of high-speed traffic, pushing 100 and pretty sure that physics doesn’t apply to him, though I have to admit that Florida isn’t different from any other state in that way. Traffic stopped cold more than once: for a banged up, upside-down SUV; for a raging RV fire, attended by a half-dozen firemen; for a serious two- or maybe three-car wreck on the other side of a divided highway; for construction, usually without any workers in sight; and once for no reason that we could tell at all.
In Orlando, we spent all December 9 at Universal Epic Universe, a theme park that only opened in May. Ann flew in the day before we went to the park and flew home the day afterward, taking advantage of the low prices that discount airlines offer to high-volume places in a shoulder season, if you take no bags and buy nothing to eat or drink at sky-high prices, literally and figuratively. A small bag of hers had been stowed in our car for the visit.
A theme park is one thing, but I wanted a look at Orlando, at least a sliver of it, the next day. Ann’s flight was fairly late that day, so we were able to spend part of it in posh Winter Park, including a tour boat ride through the town’s small lakes, lush with greenery and expensive houses on their banks, and connected by canals.
A drive that included the stretch of US 41 that passes through the Everglades took us to Homestead, Florida, and the mid-century charms of The Floridian motel. A day in Everglades NP followed, including an airboat tour and a drive to the coast at Florida Bay. The next day, before leaving Homestead for a drive in the rain across the Overseas Highway to Key West and while the sun still shined, we toured the Coral Castle, a one-man construction project using 1,000 tons of oolite to make walls, carvings, stone furniture, and a castle tower.
Key West was a two-day, three-night mid-December ramble on the busy and less busy streets of Old Town, including humans but also chickens, taking in the likes of the Hemingway House, the Little White House, Mallory Square, the San Carlos Institute, the Key West Aquarium, and the Key West Cemetery. Also, tourist shops, boutiques and the building where Pan-Am was founded. We ate and drank, though as our wont, nothing alcoholic. Key West was decked out for the holidays but not over the top. We walked and walked some more. It felt like a couple of pleasant summer days.
From my 2014 visit, I knew that on the back streets near the little-visited cemetery, parking was possible on an otherwise cramped island. So it was. On Margaret Street, within sight of the cemetery.
The return drive took us up the eastern coast of Florida, but avoiding the worst traffic in Miami-Dade by taking Florida’s Turnpike. By December 17, we’d arrived in Orange Park, a large suburb of Jacksonville, for a stay with two other dear friends, former Austinites now in northern Florida. Part of the next day was in and near downtown Jacksonville, one of the larger U.S. cities I’d never visited before (I believe San Jose is now the largest on that list). During our downtown stroll, we encountered the coolest building in Jacksonville and certainly one of the coolest in Florida.
We quit Florida on the 19th, but weren’t quite done with the trip. Yuriko had never been to Atlanta and wanted to go. Though I’d been however many times since 1982, I was happy to oblige, so we spent two nights and a day there, using the day to see the astonishing Georgia Aquarium and the impressive but somewhat overpriced World of Coca-Cola.
The last legs of the trip were long drives: Atlanta to Elizabethtown, Kentucky; and from there to home the next day. I wasn’t about to let them be completely dull drives, so we stopped on the second-to-last day in Chattanooga, to see the conveniently located, blocks-from-the-highway Chattanooga Choo-Choo redevelopment. On the last day of the trip, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and walked across the Big Four Bridge, a former RR bridge across the wide Ohio, now serving pedestrians and bicyclists.
Home and then — Christmas, when things slow down for a week or so. Good timing.
Which of these two destinations aren’t like the others?
That’s a beginner’s-level question. Better question: where can you find this pole, with mileages and – what units measure the distance to Heaven or Hell? – other signs?
Answer: Cairo, Nebraska.
Maybe a palm tree was in the works, but the city decided not to spend any more money. Cairo (pop. 822) is one of the small chain of small towns on the eastern section of the highway Nebraska 2, which runs westward and north of Grand Island. Cairo is the first place I stopped on my way west on that highway in early September.
Eventually the highway reaches the Nebraska National Forestand Grassland, a patch of (partly) wooded land that inspires the question, there’s a national forest in Nebraska?
West from the forest, Nebraska 2 crosses the Sandhills, an unusual place here in North America, with the land morphing from cropland to ranch land on sandy steppes. The towns on the way are mere hamlets, and sometimes not even that. On the western edge of the Sandhills, one comes to the sizable town of Alliance, Nebraska, home of Carhenge and railroad staging area for coal trains headed east.
Before I did the drive, I was looking forward to it as much as any of the roads in Colorado. It lived up to expectations. Nice when that happens.
The Fence Postcites Charles Kuralt’s fondness for Nebraska 2: “Highway 2 is not just another highway that goes somewhere. Highway 2 is somewhere,” he’s known to have said. I’d say whatever else his failings, Kuralt had good taste in roads.
Just outside Broken Bow (pop. 3,491), seat of Custer County and pretty much the only town of any size in that county, the Sandhills Journey Scenic Byway Visitor Center offers a building with bathrooms and pamphlets and displays and, for my visit at least, a grandmotherly and talkative volunteer. Old enough, she said, to remember when the highway was just a road through the countryside that attracted no attention from the outside world. Not a scenic byway, and sand hill cranes were just flocking birds. Now a trickle of tourists and bikers and RVers come this way. She had some solid recommendations, especially a good diner for lunch.
The visitor center grounds include a relocated (or was that reconstructed?) Sandhills cabin. The residences of the farmers trying to scratch out a living in the Sandhills, and finding out that no amount of scratching would make decent crops grow consistently from the land.
The Custer County Courthouse. Saturday, closed.
A block from the courthouse, some buildings around City Square Park.
City Square Park is a generic sort of name. Wonder whether there’s anyone from the town who can be honored by renaming the park? Looking at list of notables from Broken Bow, one instantly stands out.
Wiki: “Solomon D. Butcher (January 24, 1856 – March 18, 1927) was an itinerant photographer who spent most of his life in central Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States… he began in 1886 to produce a photographic record of the history of European settlement in the region. Over 3,000 of his negatives survive; more than 1,000 of these depict sod houses.”
Frederic Schreyer and family, Custer County, 1880s, by Solomon Butcher.
Definitely name the park after Butcher, Broken Bow.
One more in that town. I couldn’t be bothered to get out of the car.
West of Broken Bow is Anselmo (pop. 145), home of this church, St. Anselms Catholic Church, nicknamed Cathedral of the Sandhills. Saturday, closed.
A more common sort of building, not far from the church.
Not the most imposing that I saw, but representative of the many structures like it. The grist of a photo collection. Of course it has been done. I’m pretty sure I saw a room of Bernd Becher’s photos of water towers at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Nebraska National Forest and Grassland is in an unexpected place, slap in the middle of Nebraska, not due to a freak of nature, but the efforts of human beings. Specifically, mass plantings of trees by the federal government for more than 100 years, beginning (not a surprise) during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt.
Near the national forest entrance is the Middle Loup River, broad but shallow, and crossable on a foot bridge.
I camped in the national forest. The campgrounds weren’t completely full, but there were more people than I expected for a remote spot in Nebraska. Then again, it was a Saturday night, and soon enough I figured out what brought most of them: the ATV trails. Not long after dawn on Sunday, the campers across from me – a man and a small knot of teenage boys – roared away in a small caravan of ATVs crusted with dust from the day before.
I packed up and sought out a quieter place. A national forest hill with a fire tower and some views. The tower was closed.
But the views were still pretty good.
West from the national forest, Nebraska 2 heads into the rolling grassland of the Sandhills proper. In the village of Thedford (pop. 208), varied public interpretations of the Sandhills are available for reading.
The terrain along the highway Nebraska 2 might seem monotonous to some. Too bad for them. You’re driving across a kind of ocean, terrain all wavy, except that it’s solid ground, marked by occasional trees or manmade structures, and side roads — trails — wandering deeper into the hills.
The handful of towns are really just wide places in the road. Sometimes, not even that.
Nebraska 2 parallels the BNSF line, which came first.
Note: I was standing on a public side road to take that picture, as I do with all my RR shots.
Eventually, I took the road to Alliance. But that was merely incidental. Out this far, the road, as Kuralt said, is the destination.
Our first winterish weather blew through early this week, but we’re back to cool days. For now. Some leaves seem to be clinging a little longer than usual, but most are accumulating on the ground, as expected for November. A scattering of Christmas decorations are already up, and I don’t mean in stores, where they’ve been for weeks. Let November be November, I say.
Much of my return from the East Coast generally followed the westward course set by the National Road, though I didn’t use much of US 40, which has that nickname. If you want to make decent time, you take I-68 through Maryland and then I-70 across Ohio and into Indiana, which pretty much parallels the National Road.
The Interstate is designed for just that kind of efficient travel. On the whole, it delivers. The four-lane highways also deliver boring drives, to hear some tell it. That’s an erroneous assumption, to hear me tell it. The Interstate has its fine stretches, such as I-68 in October, a gloriously colorful drive. Winding and hilly, too, through Maryland’s peculiar panhandle.
A rest stop near Hancock, Maryland, offers views to the north, so most of what you see is Pennsylvania.
The rest stop is at Sideling Hill, an enormous rise gouged by an enormous cut for I-68 to go through. An impressive feat of engineering, completed only in the 1980s. Then again, blowing up mountains is a thing that happens in this part of the country.
The narrowest part of the Maryland isn’t far away. At its narrowest, there is less than two miles are between the Potomac and the Mason-Dixon Line. So if you picked up Maryland by the panhandle, it would surely break at that narrowest point.
I filled my gas tank off the highway in the last town in Maryland, Friendsville (pop. 438), at a station whose enclosed retail space (between a few pumps) seemed little bigger than a walk-in closet, and yet there was a clerk manning the place on Saturday just before dark. Rotund and massively bearded, he was playing a video game when I opened the door to pre-pay. He might have been a little surprised to encounter a customer, at least one who didn’t pay at the pump.
From there, I continued into West Virginia, then took I-79 north into Pennsylvania, then headed west on I-70, which crosses West Virginia’s odd panhandle – more like a periscope – before reaching Ohio. After overnighting in Cambridge, Ohio, I bypassed Columbus but stopped in Springfield, near Dayton but with a distinct geographic identity. Alcor to Dayton’s Mizar, you might say.
Downtown Springfield was practically devoid of pedestrians that Sunday, and not that many cars drove through either. A few buildings rise high enough to suggest a more prosperous past, but look too closely and some of them seem to be as empty as the streets, or at least underutilized.
The National Road went, and still goes through Springfield, in the form of US 40. A milestone in Springfield marks the point at which the federal government quit paying for further westward expansion of the road. Anything else would be on the states, namely Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
Later, after the National Road had become History, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a series of statues along the route, and others to the west: “Madonna of the Trail.”
There are 12, with the easternmost of them along the National Road. Erected in the late 1920s, the Springfield one was renovated about 20 years ago.
Nearby, passersby are urged to Dream Big.
About an hour west of Springfield, at the border of Ohio and Indiana on I-70 – just barely inside Indiana – is the Uranus Fudge Factory. I had to stop for that.
Sure, there’s fudge in there somewhere, but also a lot of gags involving the word Uranus(Your-anus). Examples can be found in the newspaper — an honest-to-God paper newspaper — that the store produces, The Uranus Examiner, and gives away. I have a copy. My kind of souvenir.
Sample front-page headlines from the Summer 2025 edition:
Breaking News: You Can Explore Uranus In Three Locations
Eating Their Way Through Uranus
Get A Lick Of Uranus
Sink Your Balls In Our Putt Holes
The second of those stories was about the 2nd Annual Eating Uranus Fudge Galactic Championship held at the Anderson, Indiana location in March. Apparently it was a Major League Eating-sanctioned event, and apparently MLE is a real thing. One Patrick Bertoletti won the 2nd championship at Uranus, putting away a bit more than nine pounds of fudge in about as many minutes.
Fudge is one thing, but mostly Uranus sells stuff. A lot of stuff.
The Richmond, Indiana location is the third of three for Uranus, and I think the only one with dinosaurs —
— and a 100-foot cross of corrugated steel over a metal frame.
Until about 10 years ago, the property belonged to New Creations Chapel, which also included a church building, boarding school for troubled teens and a Bible college. The ministry, for reasons its web site explains in some detail, sold the property to Uranus, including the cross.
Heading through Richmond, Indiana, I stopped at an entrance to a large park to check my map. Glen Miller Park. A colorful spot in October.
Not named after the bandleader, which would be Glenn Miller Park. “Glen Miller Park was established in 1885 and was named for Colonel John Ford Miller, who was a railroad executive during the late 1860s,” the city of Richmond says. “Colonel Miller bought the land from Nathaniel Hawkins in 1880, with the intention of transforming the land into a park.”
So Glen Miller as in glen, a term that evokes pleasant Scottish valleys. I was just about to be on my way when I noticed a statue.
It was another of the 12 Madonna of the Trail statues, located at the edge of the park, where it meets US 40. Unlike the earlier one in Springfield, I hadn’t sought it out. It was just there. One’s travels, like life, can be strange sometimes.
Coincidence or synchronicity? In September, as I was leaving Colorado Springs, I noticed an equestrian statue near a major street: William Jackson Palmer, railroad developer and Union Army officer. Stopped at a traffic light, I had a little time to look at the statue. Soon I forgot about it.
Palmer had one of those remarkable 19th-century careers, not only as a railroad man and military officer, but also a town planner, hotelier, publisher and philanthropist. He founded the towns of Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, and Durango, among others. Though he grew up near Philadelphia, he was born on a farm near Leipsic, Delaware. Barely a month after I’d spent time in some of the towns that Palmer founded, I found myself in Leipsic, Delaware.
I still wouldn’t have make the connection if I hadn’t looked up Leipsic on Wiki. I noted that the entire list of notable people from that town had exactly one name: William Jackson Palmer. Leipsic has never been a very big place, and certainly isn’t now. I looked him up, and when I saw the picture of the statue, I remembered seeing it.
I’m going with coincidence. I have a fairly high bar when it comes to synchronicity, especially since I don’t really understand the concept. Does anyone?
Before I left Delaware last month – and believe me, it doesn’t take long to leave Delaware – I drove a section of Delaware 9, a two-lane, north-south highway that parallels the coast of Delaware Bay, running east of places like Dover, Smyrna and Odessa. An intriguing squiggle on the map, made more intriguing by the fact that part of it is also known as the Delaware Bayshore Byway, which is a National Scenic Byway. Experience has taught me that those kinds of designations are usually accorded for good reasons.
After the traffic-jammed day before, I thoroughly enjoyed the nearly empty Delaware 9.
One of the few towns along Delaware 9 is Leipsic, pop. 178. I might not have stopped but for the cemetery, one so obscure that Google Maps doesn’t have a name for it, and I didn’t see evidence of a name on the ground either.
Leipsic Cemetery, perhaps. Whatever the name, it has clearly been a burial ground for a long time.
With the sort of heartbreakers you find in cemeteries of this vintage.
Three children, same family, buried in the same decade in the 19th century.
The road passes mostly through farmland, though woods and the western edge of Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge also mark its course. Delaware’s main crops are corn and soybeans, and I’m pretty sure I was in time to see the soybean leaves changing their color. Quite a sight.
You’d think I’d have seen that in Illinois or Indiana or any of the other states chock-a-block with soybeans, but I wasn’t sure I had. Driving on a two-lane road, you’re practically driving through the color, as opposed to the distance of a four-lane highway.
Corn and soy may be the main plant crops in Delaware, but the main livestock is chickens. Some 276,700,000 head of chickens were raised in Delaware in 2024, according to the USDA. That’s an impressive number, considering how small Delaware is: almost the same number as in much larger states such as Tennessee, Kentucky or Missouri. I’m not going to crunch the numbers (I have a life to live), but I’ll bet per square unit of territory, Delaware is the nation’s chicken champ.
Put this in the Those Were Different Times file: “In the early evening, I made it to the beginning of the National Association of Real Estate Editors convention. I mentioned to some colleagues of mine, who happened to be Manhattanites, that I’d spent part of the afternoon in Prospect Park — you know, in Brooklyn. Judging by their reaction, I might as well have said that I’d popped over to Outer Mongolia for a quick visit.”
I wrote that my June 2002 visit to New York included, as mentioned, time in Prospect Park. It is every bit a great park as Central Park, and I knew I wanted to return someday for a longer walk. After lunch in Chinatown in Manhattan on October 19, that’s what Yuriko and I decided to do. We took the subway to the Prospect Park station on the east side of the park, and began our wander.
Near that entrance was the Diwali Festival of Bites.
Despite the name, the food tents had a large international variety for sale, not just Indian food. Not important for us anyway, since we’d just eaten.
We headed deeper into the park. Maybe it was a matter of species choice, but there seemed to be more coloration than in Central Park the day before.
The handsome Prospect Park Boathouse.
A popular setting for weddings, and in fact one was taking place when we visited. Two women were exchanging vows.
The Prospect Park Waterfall.
Not a vast torrent, but a pleasant gurgling. It is a slice of the park’s interior waterways. Prospect Park’s watercourse is a beautiful collection of waterfalls, pools, streams and a 60-acre Lake, and is one of the shining achievements of Park designers Olmsted and Vaux’s design, says the Prospect Park Alliance.
The deeper in, the fewer people.
So few, sometimes, to almost make you forget you’re in a metro surrounded by about 20 million people.
But not for long.
Dog walkers and their tethered dogs roamed the park in numbers. Some come to the Prospect Park Dog Beach.
I wasn’t exactly sure where I’d been in 2002, but near the northern edge of the park, we came across what was probably the field, the sort of mildly rolling terrain, open short grassland ringed by wooded areas, that exists throughout the park. A summer Saturday in these fields draws a crowd, but a generally cheerful one, playing volleyball, attending to grills, picnicking, throwing frisbees or just lying around. An autumn Sunday is a little less active.
Fall has a more scattered vibe, but no less congenial than summer to the thinned out crowd.
On the morning of October 19, Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn was still pretty green.
Of course, the 30-acre park was named for the talented Revolutionary War general, not for the hues of its 50-plus species of trees, very many of which seemed to be ginkgoes. Whatever the coloration, the park proved to be a nice place for a stroll that day, offering a more manageable size than either Central Park the day before, or Prospect Park would later that day (as great as those two are).
My idea for attending Open House New York was Manhattan on Saturday, Brooklyn on Sunday, planning that took us – by this time, just the two of us – to Atlantic Terminal by way of the LIRR on Sunday morning. From there, Fort Greene Park is a short walk, though once you get there, it’s something of a hustle to climb the park’s central hill. A fort had been on the site, active during the Revolution and again for the War of 1812, for a reason.
As a park, Fort Greene came of age at roughly the same time as the idea of municipal parks themselves, that is during the mid-19th century, with some agitation on the part of Walt Whitman – editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in the late 1840s – helping facilitate its creation.
In 1857, Whitman wrote about the place, known at the time as Washington Park: This beautiful ground is now covered with rich verdure, and is one of the pleasantest resorts anywhere around. On its lofty tops you feel the breeze, and from them behold one of the finest views in the world. Most of the trees are yet too young to cast much shade, but they are growing finely.
We recollect there was a very obstinate and indignant opposition to the securing of these noble grounds, some twelve years since, when the project was mooted before the Common Council and the public. It was argued that Brooklyn was not rich enough to stand the expense of purchase; and that it would be better to let the “old fort” be dug away, and blocked up with buildings.
Fortunately these counsels did not prevail. A more far-sighted policy… carried the day.
Is there any one left of those who so furiously opposed Washington Park, who is not now glad that his opposition did not succeed?
I’m also glad there’s a park, though leaving the ruins of the fort might have been an interesting approach to creating one. As Whitman would surely have appreciated, 21st-century Brooklynites were out in numbers (but not crowds) to enjoy the park on a warmish fall day, walking their dogs and turning their kids loose to play. A scattering of other people had come for Open House.
The green space and trees were only the first layer. Come 1867, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux applied their considerable talents into making Fort Greene into their vision of an urban park, a small-scale version of Central Park or Prospect Park. That’s reason enough to visit.
One of their additions: grand outdoor stairs.
It wasn’t until 1908 that those stairs led to the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, memorializing the more than 11,500 POWs who died in wretched conditions aboard British prison ships during the Revolution.
The column isn’t usually open, but Fort Greene Park was an Open House site, so we were able to go inside after waiting in line a short time. I was expecting stairs inside. But there was just a rusty iron ladder, which the park ranger who led us into the column called “scary.” I agree.
There had been a spiral staircase in the memorial’s early days, but it is long gone. I wasn’t in a stair-climbing mood at that moment anyway, so for me it was just as well. If the city ever comes up with the scratch, there might be stairs again, the ranger said.
She also told us about the formation of the park, the long delay in setting up the memorial, and the tomb on the grounds that holds bones of some of the prisoners. The tomb isn’t open to the public.
French assistance to the nascent United States was mentioned prominently in school but not, that I remember, Spanish efforts, which were nothing to sneeze at. Maybe by 1898, Spaniards who gave the matter any thought considered the U.S. a pack of ingrates, but such is geopolitics. By 1976 and later, it was high time to acknowledge the likes of Bernardo de Gálvez and his men, and I was glad to find out that Pensacola still celebrates Gálvez Day (May 8).
Kids came in some numbers for Halloween here in the northwest suburbs yesterday, but I didn’t keep an exact count this year. The day was cool but not cold, without a hint of rain, so that might have encouraged turnout, like for voting. One time a passel of kids showed up, maybe a dozen or so, all under 10, with a smaller passel of parents off near the sidewalk.
We were giving away full-sized candy bars until they ran out, and the passel squealed with delight at receiving the various Hersey products. Even now, the costumes are a blur, maybe because I didn’t recognize a lot of the characters. Ones that I might have known weren’t familiar either. I asked the parents of a very small boy — ah, first-timers — what he was supposed to be. His shirt pattern reminded me of TMNT, but it was Hulk, they told me. “Hulk smash,” they said. “Hulk smash, all right,” I agreed.
All of the Halloween traffic, except for a handful of older kids, came before dark. My not-so-inner curmudgeon reacts: in my day, we trick-or-treated after dark, risking bodily injury on the streets, and we liked it.
But I am glad to report that the older kids – junior high and even high school – are far fewer than they were, say, 20 years ago. So it’s back to the way it should be. For older people, there are always such seasonal events as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. To this day, the ’06 iteration of that parade remains the only time I’ve encountered the band KISS live – they were the grand marshals (RIP, Ace Frehley). We also encountered Space Ghost then, or at least a fellow who was adamant about his Space Ghost identity.
Near Central Park on Fifth Ave. is 1 East 57th Street. We walked by last month.
A few years ago, luxe retailer LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton added a faux facade to its NY flagship store there on the avenue, one that evokes its signature luggage trunks in a highly visible way. Redevelopment plans for the building behind the trunks were unveiled not long ago, so I suspect the trunk-appearance doesn’t have much longer to look down on Billionaire’s Row and its strato-priced residential properties (whose high rents and sale prices don’t necessarily guarantee high-quality construction, apparently).
As we neared Central Park, we spent a little time at Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ statue of William Tecumseh Sherman (dedicated 1903) in Grand Army Plaza. Life’s too short not to look at some Saint-Gaudens from time to time.
Not far away, something a little newer.
“First Sun,” a painted aluminum sculpture of a human-scarab figure by Senegalese artist Monira Al Qadiri, and slated to be in place until the end of next summer.
Visible from near the statues is the storied Plaza Hotel and an Apple Store, which is open 24 hours, Google Maps tells me. Storied in a different way.
I’m glad the Plaza acknowledges its fictional role in The Great Gatsby by featuring a lavish-beyond-the-dreams of Croesus Gatsby Suite. Of course. A smart hotel operator isn’t going to waste an opportunity like that. In this case, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, a Canadian company, managing for owner Katara Hospitality – the large hotelier owned by the Qatari government. In the 21st century so far, the Plaza has been owned by an Israeli company and then an Indian one before Katara bought it. There’s something oddly American about an ownership trajectory like that.
We – Robert, Geof, Yuriko and I – charted ourselves a simple walking path through some of the southern reaches of Central Park. Manhattanites and visitors to the borough were out in Saturday-afternoon force. Saturday, in the park/I think it was the 18th of October. No, that doesn’t scan. A fair number of pitch-a-blanket cap and souvenir salesmen were out, too, but not nearly as many buskers as a great city park like Central Park should attract.
There’s an editorial right there: why America needs more buskers, and why some American cities need to chill when it comes to suppressing buskers. Europeans might not be right about everything, but about allowing buskers? Yes.
The leaves weren’t at peak just yet, with the greens still hanging on more than not. I don’t remember which visit to Central Park it was, but one time I wandered the park during peak coloration, whipped into even greater yellow-and-red glory by a brisk October wind. Temporary clouds of leaves came and went, even as the wind shook more leaves from their branches. Color, but also motion.
Eventually, we came to The Lake by way of Bethesda Terrace and Fountain.
But not all the way across The Lake to The Ramble, whose Wiki description drily states that “historically, it has been frequented for both birdwatching and cruising,” with hyperlinks articles about both of those activities. What about cruising birdwatchers? There’s a Broadway musical in that concept somewhere.
The Lake was clearly a good time and place for casual boating.
In that part of Central Park, it’s hard to miss Strawberry Fields. There is a fairly empty section.
That’s not the case when you get to the Imagine memorial. Among the visitors, a guitarist was noodling out one of the more famous Lennon-McCartney tunes, but I forget which. One of the usual ones. Not “Dr. Robert,” say, or “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” So that was one busker anyway, since I think he had a guitar case open in front of him. All you need is love, sure, but bills are bills.
Gone these 45 years and still packing ‘em in. Good for you, Mr. Lennon. In another 45 years? It would be interesting to know, and I sure I won’t.
I’m afraid the history of memorials doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any memorial, even the kind that people line up to pose with. I didn’t know the man, but I suspect somehow that the thought of fading into obscurity wouldn’t have bothered John Lennon.
At that point, you emerge from the park and are practically face-to-face with the Dakota.
We headed east to a subway station, and happened to walk by the entrance of the Dakota. In its grim way, it’s a kind of memorial too. The signs make it known with no uncertainty that no one unauthorized is getting in.
I didn’t realize until last night that I’d driven through some geographic oddities over the last two weeks, on my way to the Northeast and back. Actually state border oddities, such as the Erie Triangle in Pennsylvania, the curious division of the Chesapeake Peninsula, and the panhandle of Maryland.
Except they aren’t really oddities. They just look that way when you’re a kid (or an adult) poring over U.S. maps or putting your state puzzle map together for the nth time. How is it that Pennsylvania has that small chimney? Why didn’t Delaware get more of the Chesapeake Peninsula? What’s the deal with the western extension of Maryland, which narrows to only a few miles at one point?
There are historic reasons for all the shapes, both rational and arbitrary, which are the subject of books and at least one TV show. Lands were granted and claimed, borders were surveyed and quarreled over, and deals and court cases and Congress eventually settled the shapes.
The border oddities may have local and legal significance, but they’re also there to enjoy. Regular borders aren’t nearly as much fun. Sure, it’s interesting that Colorado and Wyoming look about the same, but I always liked the fact that New Mexico has a stub and Idaho tapers to meet Canada, just to name two Western examples, because not all the fun shapes are in the East. Just most of them.
To reach these border areas, I drove 2,853 miles, starting October 14, from northern Illinois to the East Coast and back, through (in order) Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York state (and city), New Jersey, New York (city and state) again, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut again, New York state (and city) again, New Jersey again, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania again, West Virginia again, Ohio again and Indiana again, arriving home today. I got tired just typing all that out.
The original impetus for the trip was to visit New York City during its Open House event. Unlike a rational person, who would have flown there and back, I decided to drive, and let Yuriko fly there and back. NYC is achievable from metro Chicago in two driving days. I decided not to do that, either, and stretch things out to fill in some travel lacunae of mine.
For instance, I wanted to visit Eire, Pa., because I’ve always bypassed it, and many Americans can say the same. I wanted to look around Long Island, or at least part of it, for the same reason. I wanted to spend the night in both Rhode Island and Delaware: the last two states in which I’d never done so. I wanted to see the capitols of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, toying with the idea of Pennsylvania too, though I decided it was out of the way. I wanted to see historic sites associated with a number of presidents along the way, and maybe a battlefield or two.
I really wanted to visit a friend in New York, and my nephew Robert, and friends in the Boston area. I’m glad to report that I did so. This has been a year of visiting old friends and relations. I’d like every year to be that way.
I had a much longer list of places to visit, and added to it every time I looked at a map, paper or electronic, since I now use both, and when I was driving — so many possibilities. But there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy in my aging body. Still, I did much of what I set out to do, with one major exception due to forces beyond my control. National Park Service sites were off the table, for reasons all too obvious and not worth rehashing here. So the homes of FDR and TR, along with Antietam and Harper’s Ferry, went unvisited. Some other time, I hope.
No matter. I visited a good number of cities and towns, drove roads large and small, empty and insanely crowded, and enjoyed a few exceptional meals and many very good ones. I saw churches and cemeteries, some historic places not managed by the federal government, and encountered the largest of the many No Kings events. I read plaques. I chatted with strangers and clerks in stores. I took a swim in Massachusetts and long walks in New York. I hadn’t planned to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge again, but Yuriko had that idea, and across we went. I listened to a lot of terrestrial radio, good, bad and indifferent. I burned gas priced between about $2.70 and $3.30 a gallon. I paid entirely too many tolls, because the Northeast is lousy with toll roads and bridges — but driving across some of those bridges, especially the Bay Bridge in Maryland, was a grand experience, and surely worth the toll.
Something I didn’t anticipate, but which improved the trip immensely, was fall color. I should have anticipated it, but I suppose I had other things on my mind. When I got to New York state, driving west to east, it became clear that I’d accidentally designed myself a fall foliage excursion. The trees were gorgeous there, and in NYC (especially Prospect Park), Long Island, and parts of New England, and in Delaware and Maryland all the way across its panhandle. Even Ohio and Indiana had some nice color when I got there, and here at home too.
One more thing: unexpected oddities along the way. It’s important to watch out for those.
In Orange, Connecticut, I noticed a sign for the Pez Visitor Center. I had to see that.
Earlier today, at the border between Ohio and Indiana, I noticed Uranus. I had to stop.
Turns out there’s more than one; I’d only ever seen the one in Missouri (the original) in passing, never stopping. But I did this time. Now I can say I’ve been to Uranus.
Our only full day in Denver, September 10, was forecast to be a hot one, so we schemed to arrive at the Denver Botanic Gardens when it opened in the morning and stay there until the heat became uncomfortable. We liked the place so much that we stayed well after the heat locked into high.
The place includes a few whimsical installations, but mostly it’s straightforward flora.
The flowers alone were worth the price of admission. Singly.
And in profusion.
At 23 acres in the middle of a major metropolitan area, the gardens are enormous, with paths leading off in various directions to a sizable pond garden, a Japanese garden, and a giant tropical conservatory, among other features, such as an alpine garden and a steppe garden and a xeriscape demonstration garden (“Dryland Mesa”). Not to forget cacti.
There was no way to see everything, so we focused on various parts, such as the pond.
I’d never see lily pads like this.
Built for squadrons of dragonflies to land on.
We also spent time in the Japanese garden, known as Shofu-en, the Garden of Wind and Pines, designed by Koichi Kawana (d. 1990). He did the Japanese garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden and a lot of other places, curiously including Suiho-En, the Garden of Water and Fragrance at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles.
Then there was the conservatory.
To listen to the three-minute audio on this page, the place sounds as high-maintenance as you’d expect, especially the watering and pruning that’s done by hand. To keep a slice of the tropics alive in a mile-high temperate location, I’d say it’s worth the effort.
