Just got back from a week's trip to New York City. We went for family business, but managed to spend four days doing the tourist thing.
One of the first sites we saw after getting lost looking for the New Jersey Turnpike was the light towers memorializing the World Trade Center (link to picture?). I didn't have much time to think about the whole situation at the time, what with trying to stay alive on the turnpike.
New Jersey highways are a mixed bag, at best. Exploring the roads is like participating in an archeological dig. The newest ones are as good as any in the country, with lots of signs alerting drivers to upcoming ramps, wide lanes, and good pavement. Going back in time, roads like I-80, which are true limited-access highways layered on top of old neighborhoods, are narrow, pockmarked, disasters. For the visitor, their worst feature is incomplete interchanges. In some places, you can only get on going West, and in others you can only get off if you are in the "local" lanes, a decision you should have made several miles back. Further back along the trail of history, you find four-lane, 55 mph highways that cut right through cities. People leaving parking lots get to mash the accelerator and go from zero to 55 as fast as they can. Cruising in the right lane without paying a great deal of attention is not a good idea.
Our first excursion involved going to Ellis Island, where many immigrants to the US were processed between 1892 and 1924. It happens that my grandfather, Oswald Luschnig, passed through Ellis Island in 1908, and I was able to find his records. All this information is available on the web. We spent hours wandering around the building, viewing exhibits and imagining what it must have been like for my grandfather and all the rest to wait in the great processing hall, wondering whether they would be admitted. He made it, and two years later my grandmother and mother (who celebrated her first birthday on a train from New York to Illinois) followed.
We drove north to Hyde Park, New York, one day, to visit my wife's friend. Hyde Park, you might remember, is where Franklin D. Roosevelt grew up. His home is available for tours, but I decided to visit the Vanderbilt mansion. Those people had way too much money.
Two days in New York City found us visiting the Museum of Natural History, with its Hayden Planetarium. The Hayden is currently the world's most advanced planetarium, and the show about possible life in the cosmos showed off all its power. We walked across Central Park and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I particularly enjoyed the Robert Leyman collection. Again, it's beyond amazing how much money some people have. Best of all, we attended a Broadway play, Metamorphoses. We picked that one simply because I had seen a Bill Moyers interview with the Mary Zimmerman, the writer and director, on his NOW program on PBS.
We didn't visit Ground Zero. I've done a lot of thinking about the place over the past seven months and didn't feel a need to actually go there. Viewing the skyline from Ellis Island, while standing next to a picture of the way it was, was sobering enough.
I've always felt a bit of relief when returning from a trip, especially one by air; this time setting foot on the tarmac at San Jose International was an even happier occasion.
9:16:39 PM 
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