This morning, we said goodbye to Boston–I think I was more sentimental about the leave-taking than Mark and walked one more time through part of the Boston Common right by our quarters on Temple Place, and then, after we had packed up all our things and trundled off to South Station for our Amtrak, I also took one more walk across the Fort Point channel that divides South Boston from the main downtown area and took another photo in the direction of the station. We really had a wonderful time discovering this city, and the many green spaces were just a huge hit.
Then we hung out until it was time for our 11:10 train to New York, which takes about 4 hours–except it didn’t feel like that at all. I was revising my conference paper and fielded some e-mails, and before I knew it, we were there! And the pleasant surprise was that there was a whole long beautiful stretch where we could see the open sea and the marshes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Especially just before and after New London, it was just gorgeous–a bit foggy and misty as the same time as the sun was shining, just beautiful. Mark managed to catch the effect even through the dirty window of a moving train. I am so glad the Amtrak lady suggested that we sit on the left side for the ocean view!
We got to Penn Station (to be precise, the new-ish Moynihan Train Hall expansion) a bit after 3:30, with a few pretty breathtaking “teaser glimpses” of the city before we dipped into the tunnel under the East River, and managed to find our way fairly easily to the Port Authority bus station where we needed to find and catch a bus to Hoboken that got us to our AirBnB in less than 30 minutes. We probably should have I suppose I have to thank my bad insomnia last night, because that’s when I researched how we would get there and what kind of tickets (specific to NJ transit buses) we would need. New York City public transport may be wonderful in terms of “you can get everywhere” but the fact that there seem to be hundreds of different companies and institutions that provide it, all with different tickets, is not very convenient when you’re a hayseed from Nebraska, and no amount of German public transport could have prepared me for this level of confusion! Undoubtedly, there are many more examples of that to come.
Our AirBnB is only about three blocks from the waterfront and nine (a 15-minute walk) from the PATH train that takes us across to Manhattan. It is in a lovely street lined with very nice mostly late 19th-century 3- and 4-story townhomes, and the next street over is Washington St., lined with restaurants and cafes and shops. We are on the third floor, in what is clearly another vacation-rental-only apartment, with a bedroom, a spacious kitchen, and a clawfoot bathtub in the bathroom (yes, I always feel guilty about these, because I know they could be someone’s living quarters instead. But we really could not get any reasonable hotel rates–and I am so happy to be in this neighborhood and not directly IN Manhattan that I will just have to live with the consequences of ruthless capitalism). Mark immediately declared that it has “a view”–because unlike in Boston, we can see OUT–even if it’s into backyards from the kitchen in the back and down onto the street from the bedroom. It is quite lovely here, and we did find the promised washing machine on the first floor that we desperately needed, since we are completely out of clothes.
This will be a nice home away from home for the next six days.
After stuffing our laundry into the washer/dryer, we took off to go to the waterfront, and boy, did it deliver. The view of ALL of the western side of Manhattan was breathtaking. It does make me feel like the above-mentioned hayseed. Boston was sort of “the right size” for me, but this city–even JUST Manhattan–is SOOOOOO big! The pile-up of skyscrapers both in Lower and Upper Manhattan is just nuts. We could only identify a very few (Mark finally picked out the Empire State Building), and I know it’ll make my head swirl to be among them every day for the rest of our visit, starting tomorrow. So it was nice to start out with a bit of an overview from a distance, and across a body of water–always my favorite thing. We walked along the Hudson on this beautiful promenade that weaves in and out of piers along the waterfront, with lots of people just enjoying the weather or jogging or taking their dogs for a walk, and ultimately ended up at the PATH terminal (which is underneath a GORGEOUS old “city beautiful” train station from the early 1900s) and found our bearings/got our MetroCards for tomorrow. Then we walked back in the general direction of our apartment, had a burger for dinner, bought some breakfast items, and returned home to our new digs.
