if i can make it there - just shoot me

The year was 2008, and the movie was Elizabethtown. Actually, that movie was released in 2005 but by 2008 the DVD was out. And DVDs mean only one thing: you watch the same movie over and over until you get sick of it...or until you get just plain sick. Either works.

Elizabethtown is not a very good movie at all. It's got a few things going for it, though. Paul Schneider is in it. Alec Baldwin does a pithy but surprisingly amusing cameo in it. The band My Morning Jacket is in it. In point of fact, you've probably seen most of this cast someplace before. The soundtrack is pretty damned good, which is characteristic of Cameron Crowe movies. With all that said, the real appeal for me comes from the second part of the movie. That's the part where Orlando Bloom's character takes a road trip to a bunch of quirky destinations as he drives home to Oregon from Kentucky. That movie is the reason that my wife and I started taking regular vacations in the form of extended road trips across and through parts of the United States.

The primary idea of these road trips was to see a bunch of places once or twice and then figure out where we'd want to visit again for a longer stay. There certainly are some destinations that we'd love to see again, but who in their right fucking mind is going to go anywhere on vacation in the United States these days? My wife's a US citizen, which actually makes it much easier for her to visit. She's got family there, so it makes sense for her to cross the border, especially when it comes to seeing her mom. Mom's getting on for ninety, so you make the effort, right? For me, Driving While Black in the States was always an iffy thing anyway, but doing that in 2026 on a foreign driver's license might just take that to an entirely different level, I'll bet.

For lots of reasons, we only did about four of those extended trips. After that, the vacations became somewhat less ambitious. No more driving to California, for example. Instead, we'd do something like this: stick our daughter in the car on her March Break and take her down to a bison ranch in Pennsylvania, and then down to Washington D.C. for a few days. Then we'd return by way of New York City to see Coney Island. I must say: Luna Park and the boardwalk look substantially different and lonelier in the post-winter/pre-spring chill than they do in the summer.

A sepia-toned old-timey rendering of the boardwalk at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. By the shadows, you can see that the sun is going down. The bench in the foreground closest to the camera is in focus, but you can see a row of other benches marching off into the distance, all empty. There's absolutely no-one visible on the boardwalk at all. Not surprising, as it's March.

Summers in New York City--in Brooklyn--at Coney--are a completely different thing, but even in the heat and with all the crowds and the noise and the birds and Nathan's hot dogs and the OCEAN; even with all that, you can still sometimes find ways to be alone.

Depicted in black and white, a young woman wearing an abaya and hijab wades through the surf with her arms outstretched at the edge of the beach at Coney Island. The Marine Parkway Bridge can be seen in the background off in the distance.

But yes...road trips. These trips eventually became trips to a single city at a time. If you're going to do that, then New York City is probably the place to go, or at least it's one of the places to go.

and this is where the story really begins

New York City is a lot. My wife and I have really only seen small parts of two of the five boroughs. Obviously, Brooklyn, considering the talk about Coney Island. And Manhattan, because who doesn't go see Manhattan when they're a tourist in NYC?

I guess that part of the reason that there's been no Bronx, no Queens, and no Staten Island on previous itineraries is that we spend so much time when we're in New York City just walking. There's some subway-ing sometimes because the subway is better than walking for four or more hours from the Battery to Coney Island. Frankly, walking in Manhattan is a lot more interesting (to me) than trekking all the way through Brooklyn, even if the scenic route would send us on a lovely little jaunt through Prospect Park. And again, no disrespect meant when it comes to Brooklyn's walkability and interest rating, but the next time we walk through any part of Brooklyn, we're going to have to have a better plan than something like "let's walk through Little Haiti to the Little Caribbean and see what's good."

The one walk that's always a winner takes us across the Brooklyn Bridge and down into DUMBO and through Brooklyn Bridge Park. Sometimes there's a subway ride to Coney before we come back to DUMBO to walk back into Chinatown by way of the Manhattan Bridge. We usually start the day early because we tend to prefer to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge when it's relatively unoccupied, which means getting there well before 8:00 am. I remember walking back into Manhattan across that bridge once. It was sometime in the mid-afternoon, and it was a ridiculous experience: hot, crowded in both directions, and infuriating. The one bright spot was the vendors selling ice cold water out of their coolers for only a dollar.

A black-and-white view of a wooden pedestrian walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge that is literally surrounded by suspension wires. Straight ahead is one of the bridge's massive brick suspension pillars. Its twin gothic arches on left and right are pathways that provide access to the rest of the bridge walkway.

But back to DUMBO (which, in case you didn't know, stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). There are a few places we always wind up when we're in that part of the city. Because I like to take pictures, and because I've seen everyone else's photos of this spot, my monkey brain always takes me to the foot of Washington Street so that I can take a photo of the Manhattan Bridge. It is a favourite photo spot for tourists from everywhere around the world. Go ahead and Google "Washington Street photo spot" if you don't believe me. It's about a few things: the cobblestones, the perfect view of the bridge sandwiched between the tallish buildings that line the street, and the fact that you can actually see the Empire State Building framed under one of the bridge's arched support pillars when you stand in the middle of the street.

A sepia-toned monochrome depiction of a segment of the Manhattan Bridge as seen from Washington Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn. It's framed between the tallish buildings on either side of the street and the Empire State Building is visible in the distance if you peer through the arch of the bridge support.

From that spot, we make decisions about the rest of our walking that day. If we were even only halfway determined to find it all, there's probably enough to do in and around the park, Brooklyn Heights, and DUMBO itself to make a day of it. There's even a carousel to ride. This is a spot where Brooklyn redeems itself in the "interesting" and "walkable" categories. And even if we don't feel like Doing Stuff, there are plenty of places to stop, to sit quietly, and to Not Do Stuff.

A wide panoramic view of Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park shows the Brooklyn Bridge on the left, the Manhattan Bridge on the right, and across the East River, the tall buildings of the Financial District, One World Trade Centre, and the Two Bridges area of Manhattan.

When we're in New York City, we always stay in Manhattan. We've stayed as far to the south as the Trinity Church area in the Financial District, just a short walk away from the Charging Bull statue. We've only stayed as far north as Midtown(ish), just south of the Grand Central Terminal. When you stay in midtown, you just walk and you wind up where you wind up. Maybe it's down through Chelsea and then back up to Hudson Yards along the High Line. Maybe it's over to Times Square or the Rockefeller Centre. From the south, even with no destination in mind, a northbound walk from the Financial District takes you through all kinds of cool places, starting with TriBeCa (the Triangle Below Canal Street), SoHo (South of Houston Street), and Lower Manhattan. You see those areas even before you get as far north as Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Even if you don't stop for anything...not to eat, not to shop, not to anything...just walking through the city is a worthwhile experience all on its own.

A SoHo building several stories tall has fire escape balconies and stairs running down its red brick exterior. On the bottom level is what appears to be a storefront of some kind, but it's unclear what, if anything, is bought or sold there. In the front window is a orange-red neon sign whose words read "KNOW WHAT, KNOW WHERE." The "r" in "where" is backward and it's a redder colour than the rest of the sign. The interior of the space is lit with an eerie ruby glow. I guess everybody knows that this is nowhere.

One last thing before I go. I have to talk about Central Park for a minute. It's not the largest park in the city. In fact, there are five others bigger than this one. But it's by far the most famous park, and it's the one that everyone goes to. While you're there, you can walk, you can run, you can eat, you can ride the carousel, you can play pickleball, you can visit the castle, you can sit by one of the fountains...there's just so much to do in that space that it's almost bewildering. Last time we were there we ran into an engagement party (she said yes!). The time before, we almost crashed a wedding. Zabar's Deli is only about three blocks west of the park at Broadway and West 80th Street on the Upper West Side. For the record, if I happened to be a hungry person standing at Zabar's, I'd get food from the grocery instead of from the cafe. And if we wanted to absorb a bit of culture, we could pay (and have paid!) a visit to one of the museums or galleries that are located literally everywhere on the perimeter of the park.

It's like an unwritten rule: when you're in New York, you go to Central Park. If it's winter, you skate at the Wollman Rink. If it's fall, you walk along the Mall and admire the autumn colours. In the spring and summer, you hang out on the Great Lawn, and in the spring, maybe you walk the Ramble and wind up down by the Bow Bridge.

In black and white, the ornate arch of the Bow Bridge and the nearby trees are reflected in the water. The bridge spans a narrow part of The Lake in Central Park, Manhattan.

As I said, that's the last thing we're going to talk about. Things started a kind of a long way off; talking about Kentucky, movies, and road trips. I know it didn't seem like it at the beginning, but this little conversation was always meant to end up in New York City. I hope that I get another chance to visit the place, because there are a lot of things there that I still want to see. I want to go way uptown through Harlem to the Bronx. I want to go to Flushing Meadows and see the 1964 World's Fair site. Maybe I'll get a chance to do that, and I hope I'll even get a chance to tell people about it.