Zooming Into NYC

Amtrak Adventure 5/31 (about October 4th, 2021)

Meta note: yesterday’s update, “Exploring Chicago,” seems to have been flagged as some sort of vacation promotion spam in many peoples’ inboxes; please check for it! I’ll also try to make my titles sound less sales-ey from now on.

Yesterday was the first workday since setting off on our trip! As a result, I’ve been super busy—and weekday updates won’t be as long from now on because of less time to work on them 😊

Trying to attend Zoom meetings while cruising through upstate New York was quite the experience. My first one coincided with a stop in Syracuse, and went smoothly; for the next one, though, we were in motion. All I heard before Zoom crashed was one coworker congratulating another on “now having the second worst Internet connection on the team!” and chorus of laughs all around… at least everyone else found the situation funny!

Much of my job consists of writing and planning, things I was able to do pretty well on the train; the actual programming part might have to be concentrated in the cities going forward, though. Course corrections all around!

About halfway through the ride yesterday, our train stopped in Albany for an hour—and the front half of our train detached and headed off to Boston!

front half of our train leaving us

Only 11 minutes later, they added a new engine to finish our trip to New York. It’s a pretty clever system!

new engine backing in

A few hours later, we pulled into New York’s Penn Station. Stepping out into the city together, we gasped—all the skyscrapers and bustling life of NYC is a very stark contrast to what we’d just experienced in Chicago the day before.

We took the subway to the place we’re staying (with Edyfi friends from this summer, in what used to be Edyfi Brownstone), and crashed on the bed, extremely glad to have something soft under us. One long shower later, though, and we were hungry again!

After recoiling from the prices of some more authentic restaurants, we decided to grab some cheap pizzas and walk to Central Park for a nighttime date.

eating pizzas in Central Park

We didn’t get any good pictures of it, but a couple walked past us with two very erratic dogs in tow. They were small and energetic explorers—and surely would have been lost multiple times if not for the bright circular glow-sticks that their owners had put around their necks! A very smart solution.

Bonus: walking around in the Upper East Side, we found a block where some enterprising resident had planted leafy greens (kale, cabbage, lettuce) in five tree planters along the sidewalk. I guess that’s one way to have a garden?

leafy greens along a Manhattan sidewalk