Making the best of it

I decided to take the train into NYC today to see the new Rodin exhibit at the Met. But I hit a couple of snags with that. (This post probably won’t be interesting to too many people, but it was interesting enough to me that I thought I’d write it all down. Feel free to skip it if you don’t want to read a narrative of “my day in New York”.)

The trip in was not smooth. First, there was track work between Union and Newark, so we all had to get off the train in Union and switch to a bus. I made the best of that by enjoying the scenic drive through Union. We went down Morris Ave, and passed the building where I used to work, a long time ago. The building is still there, surprisingly. And the Mark Twain Diner is still there too, where I ate many cheeseburgers in my youth! (I hadn’t been through Union in a long time, so that was actually fun.)

Then, in Newark, there were no trains running to NY Penn, due to a switching problem. So I took the PATH to WTC. I hadn’t been to the WTC since they opened the Oculus, and had been meaning to take a trip in to check it out, so this was a good excuse to do that. It’s pretty cool; I should try to get in again and spend some more time exploring it.

From there, I took the 4 train up to 86th and walked the rest of the way to the Met. (Of course, the 4 train got held at the Grand Central stop for 15 minutes for no discernible reason.) I didn’t make it to the Met until about 11:30, so the total delay came to just over an hour.

The Rodin exhibit was pretty cool, though maybe not worth a three hour trip, in and of itself. From there, I walked down to the Met Breuer, to see the Delirious exhibit.

On the walk down, I listened to the John Luther Adams Soundwalk 9:09 piece that he wrote for the opening of the Breuer last year. I’d been meaning to listen to that on the walk from the main Met to the Breuer, since the Breuer first opened, but I never got around to it until now. It’s definitely an interesting experience. (I listened to the “downtown” piece today. Now I need to take the walk in the opposite direction, and listen to the “uptown” piece.)

From the Breuer, I was initially planning on going down to MoMA. There’s not much going on there right now, but I figured it was a good spot to grab lunch and maybe sit outside in the sculpture garden for a bit. I didn’t want to walk all the way down, so I hopped on the M4 bus. When we got near MoMA, though, there was a big police presence for some reason, and a lot of barricades up, so I decided I didn’t need to deal with that and stayed on the bus.

I got off the bus in front of the NY Public Library on 42nd St, and decided to pop in. It’s only open from 1 to 5pm on Sunday, and it was around 2pm when I got there, so my timing was pretty good. I’ve never been in that “main branch” building before, and I’ve always meant to check it out, so I did. It’s a really cool building, and there’s some nifty stuff in there. I wish I’d come on a day when the gift shop had been open though. I saw a few things through the window there that looked cool.

The trip back home from there was relatively uneventful. I walked from the NYPL back to Penn Station with a brief stop at Midtown Comics.

The trains between NY Penn and Newark were running on-time again, so that was OK. I had to do the bus from Newark to Union, but it wasn’t a big inconvenience. Overall, I got home a bit later than I’d intended to, but still reasonably early.

So, as trips go, it didn’t go quite as planned, but I got to do some interesting stuff that I’d been meaning to do, and had a pretty good time.

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