Miracles do happen

Ha ha, so much for promises, eh. In the words of the philosopher A.J. Rimmer, "never apologise, never explain." So I won't, except say that it's all Em's fault. OK, possibly 90% her fault. Oh alright it's all my fault. But what matters now is that I'm back in the hot seat, and as penance for being that worst kind of blogger, lazy, I hereby declare that I will write something on my blog, no matter how small, every day for the next 30 days. Now I know you won't believe me but I feel I need to regain the trust of my erstwhile readership.

Anyway, so what have I been up to that's kept me so darn busy for the last three months? Well, back in snowy March, my parents came to visit. Here is a photo to prove it:


I'll explain about the helicopter in a bit. This was the first trip the parentals had made outside Europe, and I'm pleased to say that Boston didn't disappoint. To be fair, if you come to New England in March you have to prepare yourself for some pretty grim weather, but they only had to put up with the one Nor'easter, and it wasn't even below zero for most of the time.
The Charles River was still frozen, but the ice was on its way out. The Nor'easter happened to coincide with my dad's birthday, for which I'd booked a table at the Top of the Hub. This is a very expensive restaurant at the top of the Prudential tower and generally affords such views as this:


Unfortunately, we battled through freezing blizzards and three-foot drifts to have, well, actually a damn fine meal, but if you check out this photo of the aged parents you'll see that instead of the above view, we had just succeeded in getting ourselves up close and personal with some snow clouds.


As I said, we did have a superb meal - I had probably the best steak I've ever had - and I've chomped on quite a few - but the icing on the cake was the taxi driver who drove us home without any inclination that black ice and compacted snow lying on ungritted roads was going to slow him down or stop him from putting his foot to the floor at green lights. This was also the only meal in which we've ever succumbed to taking a doggy bag home - the twelve cookies that Em ordered for dessert were just too nice to leave.

So here are some more photos from our wintry jaunt around Boston:



(I'm really glad I bought that coat - it was in the sale at the equivalent of Millets - and consists of 2 inch thick armour plated cold-repelling insulation. I have no excuse for the hat.)




(Shh, Em doesn't know I've included that one)



We also hired a car and drove up the Route 2. This road, which is also known as the Mohawk Trail, was once one of the pioneer trails westward of Boston, and is today regarded as one of New England's most scenic drives - especially in the Fall when the forest turns golden. We drove it the day after the Nor'easter, under clear blue skies and with plenty of snow on the ground, and the trail had a distinct beauty that none of them leaf peepers will have seen.







We also went to New York City. Now, as any Bostonian will tell you, this is always a hardship as NYC is overrated and has a rubbish baseball team (the Yankees). We decided to risk it. To get to NYC from Boston the choices are:

Car (driving in New York- urgh)
Plane (hassle and expense)
Train (expensive and takes almost as long as the...)
Bus (takes ages and sometimes doesn't blow up, but cheap at $15 return)

We took the bus. It took 4 1/2 hours to get there, and wasn't helped by the God-awful film about some stupid spelling competition that they showed, but get there we did. The first thing that you notice about New York is the size of it, and the second thing you notice about New York is traffic, of which there is abundance. The third thing that you notice about New York is that most of said traffic comprises of yellow taxi cabs, and the fourth thing that you notice about New York is that the drivers are just as crazy as they are in Boston. The fifth thing that you notice about New York is that they have a rubbish baseball team called the Yankees.

It should be noted that when I say "we went to New York" I really mean "we went to Manhattan", which is, of course, just one of the five boroughs that make up New York City, but it's the most famous one. Manhattan was purchased in 1626 by the Dutch off the native American Canarsie tribe for a criminal amount of beads and trinkets, equal to about $25 in today's brass. It turned out that they were the ones to be duped, however, as Manhattan wasn't the Canarsie's to sell - it was their rivals the Lenape's, who presumably weren't best pleased when they suddenly found New Amsterdam in their back garden. It was named New York by the British when they conquered it in 1664, and recognised that the great city it was to become could only ever be named in honour of the one true centre of civilisation on Planet Earth, York.

The tradition of people arriving on Manhattan and getting duped is clearly still alive and well. If you look anything vaguely like a tourist (group of three or four, walking slowly, general brownian trajectory, heads back and mouths gawping open) you become surrounded by a swarm of people trying to sell you some sort of tour. We plumped for the horse drawn carriage around central park - the bloke told us it would be $40 (while covering up the "$34 for 30 minute tour" sign) and took us for a ten minute tour of the bottom tenth of central park. So it goes. We stayed in a hotel on 77th Street, which is about half way up Manhattan, and did all of the touristy stuff - went up the Empire State Building, went on the open top bus tours, took a boat over to the Statue of Liberty, gawped at Time Square, visited the Guggenheim, took a helicopter flight over the island, you know how it is. Here are the photos:








While we had a great time in New York, we all agreed that it was a great place to visit and then leave for somewhere a bit less 'in yer face', a place with a bit more class and culture, a modest place with a better baseball team. Somewhere like Boston, in fact.

Since then I've been to Liege, Iowa City, Cape Ann, Jupiter and Saturn. I reckon that, since I've set myself the ridiculous task of daily entries, I'd better save some of that for another day.