After four nights in New York, it was time today to move on to the second and biggest phase of our spring adventure, our cruise to Europe. Having done this once before, and not that long ago, I knew that checking in for the cruise would probably not be a big deal or take particularly long, but I was still pretty nervous about the whole thing. I did a small load of laundry in the morning as I just cannot stand packing dirty clothes. The small laundromat in the basement of the hotel was grossly overpriced, but at least the washer and the drier worked. Our suitcases were already more than full when we left Oregon, and both of us bought a few things in New York. John’s suitcase was bursting when I finally managed to zip it closed.
We were not scheduled to check into the ship until three in the afternoon, and so that left us with a free morning in New York. It seemed like a good time to go to a museum, and we both decided that we wanted to go to The Cloisters, the Metropolitan’s collection of medieval and early Renaissance art. We had not been there for many years, mostly because it is close to few other tourist attractions in Manhattan. We checked our luggage at the front desk, and I called an Uber. Our driver was there in less than a minute. I thought initially it might be one of my less pleasant rides when he scolded me over and over for nearly touching a BMW next to us with the back passenger door. But after a bit he softened and we started to have a good conversation. It is interesting to tell people on the East Coast you are from Oregon. I am never really sure that most of them could find it on a map, though they know it is somewhere around California and that it is nice there with not too many people and a lot of nature.
The Cloisters was built decades before the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it is not a easy place for people who have mobility issue to visit. The staff compensates for the lack of ramps and elevators by being extraordinarily helpful. John was moved through all kind of back corridors and staff areas.
The Cloisters is designed to look as if it were some kind of monastery. Sections of several abandoned monasteries were brought to New York and reassembled there, often just adding new stonework where some was missing. The rest of the museum was made of blocks of granite as if to suggest that it too was ancient. Nobody would do anything like this today. There would be the usual anodyne galleries with white walls, highly polished wood floors, and lighting that was either way too bright or way too dark. But the fact that The Cloisters violates all these rules of modern museum practice is what makes it fun. And since the building is fun, well, the art seems more interesting, too.
It’s pretty much all the usual medieval stuff. There’s altar pieces and reredoses, crucifixes and pietas, and no shortage of reliquaries.
Although most of us think of medieval building as having cold gray stone walls, most were actually quite colorful. Walls were covered with plaster and painted with wild frescos. Most of these were lost through neglect or the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation, but a few remain. The Cloisters have a couple examples.
At other times walls were covered with tapestries. The greatest piece in the collection of the cloisters is a series of tapestries depicting the hunting of a unicorn.
But a wonderful as all of this stuff it, it’s the cloisters and the gardens on the palisades above the Hudson that are the most fun.
After a couple hours we had seen just about everything and it was time to go back. Our Uber here was a Lincoln Continental sent from the Broadway Car Service in Washington Heights. This made me think of the play and the movie of the same name, and, as we went through the neighborhood, I was eagerly expecting to see the streets filled with dancing Dominicans. Sadly, Lin-Manuel Miranda was not there selling his coffee – just the usual traffic.
Today is the day of the big eclipse. We had one in Oregon not that long ago, but I do not recall it receiving anything more than a passing notice in the national legacy media. But somehow anything that happens on the east coast has to be covered with a degree of hysteria. I had not bothered to rearrange my day around the event, and we were scheduled to check into our cruise right around the time for the big event. So I suppose we missed the darkest few moments, but we still saw part of it anyhow.
We’re on the ship now. I’ll describe it more and show a bunch of pictures on one of our sea days later on. We do have a nice room, despite paying a bargain price for it. The room is way larger than the one on our room on 37th Street. I had requested one that was “accessible,” and this one has a nice large shower and grab bars by the toilet. It will work out well for us. Docked just off 52nd Street is also has a nice view of Manhattan.
Tomorrow we are at sea all day. The day after that we will be in Bermuda.
Traveling Johns 