Search results

… and woke up, once again, in pain – I should have listened to my head and my body last night! My hip pain, which went away as the day progressed yesterday, has come back with a vengeance. And as I write this (11am) it hasn’t gone away. So my time in NYC is ending anticlimactically, with...

I had always wanted to see a second Broadway show, and two that I particularly wanted to see both had tickets available last night: Gypsy, and Sunset Blvd. I wanted to see Gypsy for the great music and it’s star, Audra McDonald, and Sunset Blvd because of its great reviews and its intriguing...

Thanks — I’ll try not to let it go to my head!

Ah, now, see, you shouldn’t have said that. Because now you’ve got me started. This is the first Vigee Le Brun painting I ever saw, in 2002, and I was immediately entranced. It’s a self-portrait of the artist with her daughter. At the time, I was the father of very young daughters, and this...

Thank you so much for your very kind words. I've really enjoyed putting this TR together! To answer your question: yes, the USA is expensive at the moment; I actually do think that "shockingly expensive" is about right. Expect everything to cost what you'd expect to pay in Australia, or more...

I’ve been wanting to spend my 2025 A$200 AmEx Platinum international dining credit on this trip (I know it’s early in the year, but hey…). I chose Bar Primi: first because it was relatively close, second because it was open for lunch, and thirdly because I realised that I was missing pasta! It...

After arriving back, and given I was already downtown, I went to the 9/11 Memorial. It was peaceful and the Memorial’s use of water is excellent – soothing, even. I could barely imagine the contrast between what I was experiencing at that spot, and what it would have been like at that same exact...

When I boarded the ferry it was minus 2 degrees C, yet the vast majority of passengers stepped outside. Hypothesis: the vast majority of passengers were tourists. Pics from the trip to Staten Island. Towards the end I discovered that if I climbed down a level I could get outside at the bow of...

Today is another chilly day – in fact it has not gone above freezing all day. Just the day to spend outside! It’s fair to say that I’ve been doing a lot more walking than normal (15,500 steps yesterday, 14,600 steps the day before, 18,200 steps the day before that; I’d normally average...

Later that night I caught the subway again and made my way to this gate, with a sign on it which read “Lower East Side Toy Company”. I opened the gate, went down the stairs, and through this passage. Down this alleyway… Up these stairs… Through this door… To find this place: The...

The tour ended, but at the exact spot where there were several artworks by Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun – probably my personal favourite artist, whose works I fell in love with during that first visit to the Louvre that I wrote about above. It was a thrill to see more of her works. By the time...

I went to have another overpriced lunch at one of the museum eateries; it was very crowded so a man sitting alone indicated that I could share his table. I sat down; we made conversation and he told me that he’s a Museum member and that he comes to the Met often. He told me that the Met’s...

Having taken the “Highlights” tour and having seen how huge, confusing, and overwhelming the Met is, I decided to re-think my normal gallery strategy of spending the rest of the day doing my own thing. For the Met, in its great wisdom and beneficence, does not merely have a free “Highlights”...

Once inside, I walked up to the Information desk and, naturally, asked if there was a free tour. As has become my habit, I’d walked in just in time. So I did a one hour “Highlights” tour. These are the artworks that the Highlights tour covered, although the guide did say that the guides are...

Yesterday (Tuesday) required a slight change of plans. I had been planning to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today (Wednesday), only to discover that it is closed on Wednesdays. So I bought my ticket online and headed over after a seriously disappointing buffet breakfast at the hotel. A...

After the show I did not feel like returning to my hotel, so I remembered that a friend had recommended Ellen’s Stardust Diner; I looked it up and was happy to see that it was nearby. Ellen’s Stardust Diner is a normal NYC diner like you see on every corner. With one exception. All of the...

I saw a Broadway show last night, but I need to confess that I went about it in exactly the way I said I would not go about it in Post #111 above. The best-laid plans, and all that. While I was at Newark Airport waiting for my shuttle bus to arrive I logged on to the TodayTix web site and I...

Hilton Hampton Inn Manhattan-Chelsea. 3 night stay. Cost: A$217.58 plus A$400 AmEx Platinum Reserve travel credit. Some photos of my hotel. The room has seen better days, and it’s small, but apparently that’s par for the course in NYC and I’m getting a very good price in a very good location...

UA4442 DCA-EWR Economy class. 7,800 Velocity points plus A$15.10. Mitsubishi CRJ-550 (AKA Bombadier CRJ or Canadair Regional Jet), 50 seats. (I almost booked a Delta flight for 4500 Virgin Atlantic points, before discovering that Delta would have charged me US$35 for luggage. So I used my...

One more thing: New York City really is "the city that never sleeps". Unlike my days in the USA so far, where I've basically been able to come back to my room at the end of a day out and do things such as write up this trip report, I'm actually envisaging that I'll -- gasp!! -- go out at night...