sidetracked but in the right direction: New York, New York

Last month, Brian and I headed East for a family thing. The 'family' is loosely based in Albany, NY.

I've never really been to New York City, but I have loved the City from afar for a number of years now. (Full disclosure: we had a 4 hour layover in Trenton the summer of 2002, so we took a cab to the City, visited Ground Zero, ate a pizza, and went back to the airport. That doesn't count.)

Brian has said for a while now that he would take me to NYC the first chance he got. And when we headed to Albany in July, he made it happen.

We flew to La Guardia and were picked up late that night by Tim and Katrina, Brian's cousins who live in Brooklyn. We stayed at their apartment that night and got up the next day to spend our 6-ish hours packing in as much of Manhattan as we could before catching a train to Albany.

It was awesome.

Tim showed us around and hit the highlights for us. We went to Times Square, Bryant Park, the NY Public Library (supposedly it has lions at the front of it, but they were being cleaned or fixed or something and the whole facade was covered), Union Square (with the farmers market!) (it turns out I hate wheatgrass) and Battery Park, where we could see the Statue of Liberty, etc. Katrina met us for lunch and we got some pizza (duh) and spent some time sitting on park benches. We did a lot of poking around, really. We poked around the library. We poked around Battery Park. We poked around Union Square. When we weren't busy poking around, we were hauling it to the next spot.

This trip wasn't about tourism. We didn't go to Central Park, we didn't ride to the top of the Empire State Building (but we were close to it!), we didn't see any shows or concerts, we didn't go to the Smithsonian or the MOMA, there weren't any 11pm dinner reservations at happening restaurants. All of those things will happen when we have more time there. (Except maybe for the dinner reservations. You can take the girl out of the budget, but you can't take the budget out of the girl.) We didn't want to be tourists. We wanted to see the city, to see what it might be like to live there. Some of the pleasant points, at least. I still have a 'maybe someday' recurring fantasy about living in the City for a while. At this point I doubt that will ever happen, and that's ok. But I'm not sad to have family there, so I can live vicariously through Tim's blog!

It was really great to get to know Tim and Katrina better. Brian has known them his whole life, but I've only been around them a couple of times each and haven't had much time to get to know them. So that was great.

I took my camera, yes, but I didn't get many chances to take photos. This wasn't a photography trip. And I didn't want to look like a gawking tourist all during my first real trip to the City. So I really only thought about two kinds of pictures: 'portraits' of Tim, Katie and Brian, and 'architecture' for lack of a better term - I wanted to take cool pictures of buildings. All told, I probably only got 20 images total, and after whittling those down, I have about 7 saved from our New York City trip.

I'm only going to share photos of the buildings, here. I forgot to have Tim and Katie sign the release forms. (kidding!) All photos were taken using my Nikon D50 and a 50mm lens.

The building reflected on the left is the Empire State Building. I never found out what the other building is, but it looked church-y and very brown with some gold trim.

The tall building to the far left is the Empire State Building. The guy in the foreground is my husband. I took a bunch of these while we were walking down....6th Ave I think...toward Bryant Park. I was using my 50mm lens and finding it surprisingly ~~difficult~~ impossible to get both Brian AND the entirety of the Empire State in the frame. I was holding my camera down at my hip for this one.

We had just left the library and were walking down 42nd St, past what I kept referring to as Union Station, which is actually Grand Central. (It's Union Station here in Denver.) The Chrysler Building is probably my favorite New York City landmark, thus far, and I was playing with reflection again. We were walking at medium/fast speed the whole time and the sidewalk was a little busy so I didn't have the time to get the exact framing I wanted. Either way, you get the idea. And it was really cool to be walking this street, watching the reflection move and change in the building to the right, while the building itself loomed larger on the left.