June 12-13, 2018

June 12-13, 2018

The heat in Tucson is on and I am antsy to get to cooler climes. Our choice this summer is Scotland. We wanted an easy trip to an English speaking northern area. But the adventure of travel is fighting us at every turn.

Our connecting flight was in Houston and after making the long walk to our next gate, Aimee gets paged twice to return to our arrival gate to retrieve a lost item. Hightailing it back to the first gate, we find it abandoned and another page for Aimee at the new gate we just left. Customer service is clueless. Frustated we hoof it once again and find out they think we forgot a backpack with baby supplies. Definitely not us. United just got downgraded on our ranking.

Squeezed into a tiny seat we arrive in time for our bedtime in Manhattan NYC.

The next morning we are up too early for the museums so we Uber it over to the 9-11 WTC spot to see what was done with the building sites. There is now a park with two gigantic sunken fountains replacing both footprints. In the center of each is a kind of black hole. Well done, but a little eerie.

We then subwayed uptown to the Stonewall Inn, which Obama made a National Monument a few years ago. Stonewall is a long time gay bar where patrons rioted against police arrests in the 60’s and is thought by some to be the beginning of the LGBQT movement. In the small park across the street a sculpture has been placed to commemorate the new National Park status.

After a short tourist stop in Times Square we train it to the Guggenheim Museum off Central Park. I assumed the art was not going to thrill me and I was right. The temporary exhibit of work by Giacometti is way too modern for me and Aimee. Fortunately the building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and is very photogenic. It consists of a spiral ramp around a central courtyard. Pretty cool and not at all like Wright’s normal Prairie-style.

We then head down the street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is a monster of a museum. Before heading in, Aimee convinces me to take a break and we eat lunch at a quaint diner a block away. At the Met we spend a couple hours going through the Egyptian wing and breezing through some other genres before getting museumed out. Plus the hard floors are making my feet ache.

We head in the direction of our hotel making a brief stop at the Lower Eastside Tenement National Historic Site. This NPS affiliate is an old tenement apartment building that was closed so long ago it is now historic. We pass on a guided tour of the un-air-conditioned structure and instead rest our feet watching a film about the immigrant experience in the 1800’s. First built to house the German and Irish immigrants that flooded NYC, it later was occupied by Italians and Jews. At one time the Lower East Side was likely the most densely populated in the world. People were packed in this building like sardines.

That night we met up with Aimee’s cousin who lives in the Financial District. Her penthouse apartment faces west and overlooks the 9-11 Memorial. Interestingly a restaurant around the corner where Anthony Bourdain was once executive chef is now an impromptu Memorial to his recent passing. After dinner her cousin's brother arrived and we talked about NYC city life.