If you gotta go

It’s Saturday morning and I’m in New York. Get myself into gear - after four days on the train I’d better give the old legs some exercise. So I go searching for the Queen Mary, well not the ship itself  ’cause it won’t be there, but the dock and ticket office, so I know where to go on Sunday. I had asked the cabbie at the station to take me to a hotel near the docks - he had never heard of the Queen Mary, but said he knew a hotel which was only two blocks away from the piers.

                                                           So I booked myself in
                                                           To the Holiday Inn
                                                           Which was just two blocks 
                                                           Away from the docks

Unfortunately, what I had forgotten was that New York City is more than just Manhattan and as I discovered, the new QM terminal is in Brooklyn which is over the bridge with the same name, on to Long Island and then cut back towards Governors Island. Still, at least I’m sort of in the right place and will of course leave in plenty of time, as you may note I have become accustomed.

On my search for a non-existent pier, I am reminded of the american obsession with fitness,( only surpassed by their obsession with eating ), by a steady stream of joggers. Everywhere I look there are joggers to the left of me, joggers to the right. All different shapes and sizes, but the majority having one thing in common - they are all in bodies which were not designed to run - not at any speed. Now why can’t people just accept that physically they are not meant to run. Those who are vertically challenged ( short arses like me ) don’t try and leap over the high jump. Those who are not over endowed with muscular power ( little weeds like me ) don’t go in for weight-lifting. So why do those who look like they would have difficulty walking at anything above spritely, persist in painfully attempting to run a 5000 metres pretending they are born in Ethiopia and it all comes naturally ?

Nobody seems to have even heard of the Queen Mary, let alone know where it leaves from. So I consult the Cunard website which of course I should have done in the first place, because it tells me exactly where it is and how to get there.

For the next six days I am going to be on a boat, so how do I spend the afternoon? On a boat - a cruise round the island of Manhattan which turned out to be very interesting and informative, and also gave my little legs a rest - I had walked to the pier down 42nd Street.  Here I saw a black guy with a stall selling all sorts of stuff. He was sitting on a box fiddling with a Rubix? Cube. I asked him how long he’d been doing it. He grinned and said “All day, man”. I smiled, tapped him on the shoulder and said “See you here tomorrow”  

Went out that night and found a really good  Soul-food restaurant where the food lived up to the description on the menu “Creamed mushrooms” followed by “Meatloaf” - I’m a native New Yorker.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.