JodockWorldTravel

July 25-27, 2025

This weekend we are back in one of our favorite cities – New York! With a scheduled arrival time of 4:00 p.m. we were confident we would have no problem getting to our hotel and fitting in dinner before making a 7:00 p.m. performance of Hell’s Kitchen, a play loosely based on the life of Alicia Keys, who wrote all of the music for it. When our plane landed at JFK at 3:30, were sure of it! Clearly, we forgot where we were.

A thirty-minute jaunt around the entire airport to get to our gate, a nearly ninety-minute wait for luggage and a 60-minute taxi “sprint” to our hotel in Times Square left us less than twenty minutes to get checked in, deliver our multitude (never have we ever packed so many bags for a trip – not even when we traveled around the world for 180 days!) of bags to our room and get to the theater. Thankfully the theater was just across the alley from our hotel – even if Maps did make us walk completely around the block to get there. It was totally worth missing dinner. The talent in this production is Off. The. Charts. The play was fantastic!!

Saturday’s weather was perfect for a walk around town, and that’s just what we did. We hoofed it a mile from Times Square to the High Line, an elevated train track originally built thirty feet in the air in 1934 to reduce the danger posed by trains on the street level of Manhattan’s largest industrial district. Prior to the introduction of subway systems, the railroads would hire “West Side Cowboys” to wave flags in front of trains so they would stop and allow pedestrians to cross the street. Unfortunately, there were always those impatient folks who refused to abide by the Cowboys’ warnings and wait for the trains to stop. Instead, they’d sprint across the tracks, thinking themselves faster than a speeding train. Unfortunately, most of them were not and there were many fatalities. The High Line was meant to avoid such disasters. It carried its last train down its tracks in 1980 and was scheduled for demolition in the late 90’s when a community group banded together to repurpose it into a walking path.

Need a little cooling off after the trek? Check out this very creative sprinkler…If you look closely, you can see a little black thing with a red stripe around it on top of the “leg” – that’s the sprinkler head.

We left High Line to check out the Vessel, a really cool structure with 2500 steps spread across 154 flights of stairs and 80 landings. We walked up, down and around, but could only access one side because they’re doing maintenance on the other side.

After the Vessel we went 100 stories up to The Edge for magnificent views of a smoke-filled city (fires from Canada).

Some people do what’s called The City Climb at The Edge. They don hard hats, harness themselves to a railing and climb 161 nearly vertical stairs to lean off the literal edge of the building 1,200 feet above the ground. No, thank you, very much. Pam will jump out of a plane 18,000 feet up, but she’s not leaning off the side of this building! You’ll have to take the word of these folks from The Edge’s website about how great an experience it is.

Our final stop of the afternoon was the iconic Chelsea Market, considered one of the greatest indoor food and marketplaces in the world. You’ll find everything from meat to cheese to fish to a variety of unique retail offerings and no shortage of restaurants. The place was packed when we were there – we’re guessing there’s never a time when it isn’t – so it was tough to get pictures, but here’s an idea…

We capped our day off with dinner at the revolving restaurant atop the New York Marriot Marquis in Times Square and another Tony-Award-winning play, “The Purpose.”

Today, we boarded our Viking ship bound for colder waters. Ta-ta for now, New York!