If You Can Make It Here

"A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe." - Le Corbusier

"Like Vegas without the booze." - Becky Bechtel

We got back from our short but packed trip to New York City yesterday afternoon. This was an unplanned trip we took to take advantage of a delay before Elise's BMT process. I've got to say that I'm glad we went and it was a real neat experience, but I won't be going back real soon on personal travel. For a confirmed small town boy, that city is just too much. I think we all had a similar opinion. It's one of those places that you are glad other people enjoy living in because someone's got to do it.

We packed a lot into the few days we were there. We walked a bunch of miles (all recorded dutifully by Becky's Fitbit) and we rode the double decker buses from the north end of Manhattan island to the south end and many points in between. We went to several museums, up a couple huge buildings, through parts of Central Park, and even went on a speedboat ride ("The Beast") to the Statue of Liberty.

Once I got over the traffic (and gave the keys to the valet) and got comfortable it was simply awesome to see all the buildings. The architectural detail is just fascinating, you rarely see the attention to detail that most of the buildings built in the late 1800's through the 1930's have.

I was also impressed in a way by the traffic. Very few horns blared and it was relatively clean and quiet. Most of the taxi's are hybrid vehicles and most of the buses are "clean" so there isn't a lot of exhaust fumes. I was also quite surprised at how "safe" I felt. People were generally nice and the neighborhoods didn't seem "sketchy". Not at all what I anticipated.

The most striking contrast to me was the change from the weekend to the work week. Once the work week started the workforce came out on the streets. It was like the chaos of the weekend turned into a march of ants. It made me think of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They would come in waves and fan out from the subway stops on their way to their place of work. Was wild to watch from our hotel window high above it all.

But back to reality. NIH called yesterday and Elise has a few more tests we need to get done. So today is set aside for hanging out at the apartment and collecting pee for 24 hours (yipee!) Then she's got another CT scan and blood test tomorrow (and something else I can't quite remember). Hopefully that will be the last until she gets admitted midweek next week. I'm hoping we can get in a few more fun days as a family before the rough stuff starts.