Traveling Johns

We were in the Azores today, our first stop in Portugal. We nearly missed going there, and we had a couple near disasters while we were there. Yet despite all this, we had some glimpses of what a paradise these Portuguese islands can be.

We had really rough sea days on Saturday and Sunday. We had swells of up to 15 feet and we had gusts of up to 90 miles per hour. The captain warned that the harbor in  Ponta Delgada was not well protected from storms, and that we might not be able to dock there safely. When we went to bed, I expected to wake up to a disappointing announcement.

Instead, I woke up to find us looking out at the old center of the largest town in the Azores. It looked a bit like the illustration in an old children’s book.

The Azores are a volcanic island chain, and Sao Miguel, where Ponta Delgada is located, is famous for an enormous ancient crater now filled with small villages and a number of lakes, particularly the famous blue and green lakes. This is what it looks like in the Portugal travel books:

So, even though I knew that hiking around this area would be pushing John a bit, I really wanted to do it, and the nature walk I found on Viator called it “moderate.”

John was nervous about how difficult it might be, but he was willing to give it a try. We disembarked and walked about 10 minutes to where we found our group and our guide.

He was in good spirits as we started out.

The group was fairly large, so we were divided into three groups and each piled into a minivan. I chatted with an English gentleman who had retired to Picton, Ontario. As our van drove up the mountain, the lovely sunny day down in the town turned into cold, heavy fog, vaguely reminiscent of Mendocino County.

We had a discussion with our guides about which of two trails to take, and the entire group decided to skip the hike they had signed up and to take a shorter and easier hike that would give us a better view of the two lakes. I had the feeling that in the cold and the fog not even the guides, quite fit young men in their twenties, felt like a longer hike.

It started out pretty well. We went down an easy path until we came to a turn off for a small lake. John was willing to try the stairs down to the shore although they were not particularly well-maintained. At the bottom, our guide–sadly, I never did learn his name–took a picture of the two of us.

And I took one of the lake itself.

We continued along the main trail. This island had once been heavily forested, and there were still large wooded areas left. The most common tree were saw was the Japanese red cedar.  The forests were thick and in the foggy weather they looked almost ominously dark.

In this temperate rain forest, all kinds of nonnative plants seem to flourish. There were azaleas everywhere, though the heavy blooming season, our guide told us, had been in February.

After about 40 minutes of hiking, the trail began to relentlessly go uphill. John’s blood pressure can drop precipitously when he climbs stairs or goes up long ramps. He really wanted to make it to the vista point on top, but after seriously pushing himself he knew he had reached his limit. Our guide was understanding and told us that in the current condition we might not see anything from the top, and that where we were we could see the larger lake if the fog cleared. And sure enough, after about 10 minutes, for a few fleeting seconds, it did.

We walked back to the parking lot to meet up with the minivan driver. Because we had taken the shorter trail, he had not returned yet and that meant we had to stand around waiting. The worst thing of all for John’s orthostatic hypotension is standing. I tried to keep him pacing back and forth in the parking lot, but after a while I saw the unmistakable signs of a possible syncope. I knew that if he passed out the guides would have to call and ambulance and take him to the hospital. I wanted to avoid that at any cost. I made him take a midodrine and I held him upright to make it look like he was standing on his own. I prayed for the van to come. When it finally did, a fellow tourist, a guy with a Texas baseball hat and a body that looked like he had once played football for the Longhorns, said, “I’ve got him” and lifted John into the van.

By the time we reached the dock, the midodrine had done its job and John was feeling pretty decent. So our plan was to go back to the ship briefly, change clothes, and then return to town. I rustled around in my backpack for his wallet—we needed both our ship’s card and photo ID—and I noticed an orange at the bottom that I had stashed there at breakfast. I knew I would have to toss it out at security, so I peeled it and gave half to John. A minute or so later I looked over and realized that he was choking.

We pushed to the front of the line. People looked initially angry until they saw that there was an obvious medical problem. The Portuguese customs officials did not want to deal with this, so they immediately called Norwegian to come and get John. By this time, he had successfully spit out most of the orange and was able to talk, though he was coughing like he had tuberculosis. The poor Filipino kid who had come with the wheelchair had no idea what to do, so he took us to the ship’s medical center on deck 13. As we left the elevator I wondered why they had picked 13 as the location for the sick bay.

After a male nurse went over his medical history, the doctor came to see John. Our physician was Dr. Harold Castellanos, a Texan originally from Guatemala. He was quite competent and I liked him instantly. He was clear that John had probably aspirated some of the orange, and prescribed Augmentin just to make sure that no infection developed from inhaling the orange.

By this time, the ship was readying to leave Ponta Delgada. I was sad that I had missed seeing the town and buying a few souvenirs for a couple friends whose families had come from the Azores. But I was profoundly happy that John was not dead or in a hospital. One day I may return to the Azores. What matters for now is that I still have the person I love most in this world.

Today I took a “Behind the Scenes” tour of the working areas of the ship. It was really fascinating. We visited five different areas of the ship, but for security reasons were were prohibited from taking pictures in two of them.

After some initial orientation, we began in the food service area. With so many guests and crew to feed, you can imagine how huge this is. The executive chef began by giving us an orientation.

On our last vessel the head of food services was also Indian. It is interesting to see how certain nationalities gravitate to certain positions. He went over the different sections within the department. We were standing right by a kitchen that was devoted primarily to room service requests.

Most of the work on baking breads and pastries are done during the night, the chef explained, but there was a cook working on some cake decoration right next to us. I guessed this was perhaps a special request for somebody’s birthday or anniversary.

On the floor below, there were enormous refrigerators. This one was devoted only to meat. There were others, equally large, for fish and poultry.

Near the meat freezer was the butcher’s. There are large refrigerators here where the meat thaws before it is carved.

The next area we visited was the laundry. Like the food service area, this was huge. Our introduction was provided by the head of this department.

He was funny. He started by telling us all he was from “South Philly…you know, the south Philippines.” He showed us some of the specialized equipment they have. The main washing machine was impossible to photograph, but it was amazing. It had 23 different compartments and the laundry moved from one to the other as if on a conveyer belt. The washer processed roughly 60 pounds of laundry every minute. Contrast that with my LG machine that takes an hour to do a few shirts.

After washing, it is time to dry. There’s a huge dryer that is mostly used for towels. For other items, there are special dryers. For example, this one was for sheets. You just attach two ends of the sheet to the holder. It snaps the sheet open, then presses it, and best of all, on the other side it comes out neatly folded!

There is a similar device for napkins.

And this one was my favorite. It is for dresses and robes. Just put the item over the mannequin, snap the ends of the sleeves shut, and a blast of steam makes the wrinkles disappear.

On our way to the engine room, Samid, our Brazilian guide, went over work routines and conditions.

The ship’s crew work 8 hours a day, excluding time for breaks and meals. They occasionally work overtime. They work seven days of a week. A few share quarters, but most have small individual cabins with shared bathroom. Contracts are generally for either four or eight months. Typically crew members have either two or four months between assignments. Norwegian flies them to their initial embarkation point and from their final disembarkation point home. There is no obligation once a contract ends, but most crew members are happy to sign up again and again as it is a good way to save substantial money to send to their families.

Our next stop was the engine control room. We were not allowed to take pictures here. But really there was not that much to see. The control room is covered in large computer screens, each the size of a 58 inch televisions. These report on the functioning of every major mechanical system on the ship. Ship engineers monitor them 24 hours a day, although any major issue will be automatically flagged by the computer system.

The heart of the vessel consists of five boilers that generate electricity. Four are working at all times; one is a backup in case of a failure. They are fueled by heavy oil which is solid when placed on the ship and has to be heated before it can be burned. The ship uses reverse osmosis to turn seawater into fresh water. About 100 gallons a minute are purified. There is a sewage treatment system that transforms waste water into potable water. However, even though the water is now clean it is discharged back into the ocean. Waste is burned, but scrubbers remove most of the contaminants before they reach the atmosphere.

After the engine room, we went to the theater. We met with the stage manager. Normally we would have looked at the stage, but a Q and A session with members of Choir of Man was going on at the time. So instead we went to the dressing room, normally off-limits on tours.

We were not supposed to take pictures here to protect the privacy of the actors, but the stage manager let it pass and nobody from security was there. It seemed like a dumb rule. There’s not that much interesting about costumes hanging on a rack.

About 20 techs work in the various theaters and nightclubs around the ship. They mostly keep the lighting and audio systems working properly. But all work together when needed to put up or break down a theatrical set.

Our final stop was the bridge. The head of security, a tall and quite handsome Indian guy, showed up again and he definitely made sure that no pictures were taken of any of the equipment or personnel. But again, there was not a whole lot. The bridge was a spacious place with, as you would expect, a perfect view of the ocean. But it was all computer screens. Much of the steering of the ship is done by an autopilot program. When necessary to switch to manual control, tiny joysticks are used instead of the traditional wheel.

I was really happy I did the tour, and I had a renewed sense of appreciation for all that the crew does for us behind the scenes.

We are coming to the end of our days at sea, and after four days crossing the Atlantic by ship, I have a clearer appreciation for air travel! Taking several days to do this is a restful, I suppose, but it does get a little boring at times. So, since I have new shore destinations to share, I thought I might show a little about our Ship, the Norwegian Escape.

First of all, this is the biggest damn boat either of have ever been on. It’s like a small city. There are about 4100 passengers and some 1600 crew. That makes the Escape almost the size of city of Talent, Oregon! There are 19 decks on this ship. I’ll show you just a little of it.

Our cabin, as I mentioned before, is pretty comfortable. We are on the tenth floor midship. We have a small but very private balcony. Two people can sit there comfortably. The bed is also pretty comfortable.

There is a nice little couch which could be turned into a twin bed. John likes it. Could that be because its right by the television?

The bathroom has a double sink and a nice large shower. It’s much, more more spacious and comfortable than any ship bathroom we have ever had before.

The are two sections of the ship that are public areas. First are the upper decks, decks 16 through 19. Decks 16 is the most important of these. Most of deck 16 is taken up by the pool. Now, while our current trip is not as chilly as the one we took a few years ago around Cape Horn, it is still a little too cold for most people to want to spend much time lying by the pool. But a few brave souls do so at least on the warmer days. I got up early the other day to show you what the pool looks like without forcing you to look as some shall we say generous physiques.

You will notice the giant waterslides at the end of the pool area. When I first saw those on cruise ships, I thought, ‘How tacky.’ But now that I see them closer up, it seems like brilliant solution to hide the superstructure of the ship, particularly the smoke stacks. Plus, it keeps the kids busy!

There is a special water park at the bottom which even appealed to this senior, well, maybe if it were a few degrees warmer.

The fitness center and the spa are also located on this deck.

Most of the time the gym is pretty full of people. At 5:30 in the morning, though, when I snapped these pictures, most of my fellow passengers were still sleeping.

The café is located on this deck in the stern area. It is absolutely huge, perhaps the biggest buffet I have ever seen. The food there is also surprisingly quite good. Since the passengers are almost as international as the crew, they have to offer a wide variety of cuisines. The Chinese and Indian fare is far, far better than anything I have ever had in southern Oregon.  And it is open between five in the morning and midnight, though the earlier and later hours have fewer offerings. Despite the fact that it serves hundreds of people each hour, it is usually not that hard to find a seat not too far from a window.

The other public area are located on decks 6, 7, and 8. We will take one of the many elevators to get there.

They all have mirrors to make if feel less claustrophobic. Or maybe it serves as a reminder that all those trips to the buffet are starting to show!

The atrium on deck 6 is an open area. All the counters for guest services, shore excursions, and technical support for connecting to WiFi services are here. There is a stage there as well that is in almost continuous use for live music, trivia contests, and demonstrations. We went there one afternoon where we were shown how to carve fruit and vegetables into art.

I should have taken notes. It looked easy when he did it.

There is a huge, baseball-park-size television screen there. Every couple hours the cruise director and one of his minions appears there to tell you what to do to have even more fun.

And if your first thought, however politically-incorrect, was “How gay!” well, you’re right. I think Norwegian’s HR staff must have a table at every gay bar in Manila.

The traditional dining rooms, the ones we associate with passenger ships, at least the ones in the movies, are on decks 6 and 7. These are table service with a fair selection of appetizers and entrees on a menu. Service is very old-fashioned. Like using those crumb scrapers….

In addition to the café and the traditional dining rooms, the Escape also have almost a dozen specialty restaurants. A wide variety of cuisines are offered:  , French, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian churrascaria, Mexican street food.

These are specialty seafood and steak places. Most of these charge extra for food, though the amount is about the same as what you would expect in most American cities.

There are bars everywhere. The larger cruise lines lose money, lots of money, on room and board. These are really “loss leaders,” to use the retail term. The cruise makes up for these with charges for optional items like shore excursions, art sales, and, most of all, alcohol purchases. So every few yards in the public areas you will find a bar.

There are specialty bars as well. Just like many hotels in Las Vegas do, Norwegian offers franchises of a sort, licensing names from existing bars such as Tobacco Road, the famous Miami blues bar.

There are two theaters on the ship. The main theater alternates between their headline act, the British musical group The Choir of Man, and various other acts such as comedians and a magician.

Tomorrow I go on a tour of the crew areas of the ship. This will all be new to me, and I’ll post some pictures to show you after.

When I woke up this morning and stepped out on my balcony, the weather was definitely warmer. It was not quite like being in the Caribbean; it was more like being in Santa Barbara in June. The water had turned from a dark blue to a lovely light blue, the kind that indicates a shallow sandy bottom. I knew we were approaching Bermuda. A ship pulled up beside us, one of those guide boats that help big ships like ours come into port.

We soon passed by an old fort, one of those places which had once had dozens of cannons ready to fire at any hostile ship that came near. I knew we were coming into a place called the Royal Naval Dockyards, and it made sense to me that there would be fortifications if this had been used by the British Navy.

I had first heard about Bermuda when I was quite young. My Auntie Ev worked for the Howatt Insurance Agency in Springfield, Massachusetts. Every winter, Mr. Howatt, a man I never met but always assumed looked like the rich guy on Gilligan’s Island, would spend a few weeks in Bermuda, and while he was gone my aunt was in charge of the business. I assumed Bermuda must be a place of great elegance and sophistication for Mr. Howatt to spend so much of his time there.

I knew Bermuda would not live up to my childhood illusions, but I still wanted to see as much as I could of this island that had held such fascination for me when I was young. I looked over the various offerings and booked a tour through Viator with a firm called Bermudaful. As soon as the ship docked, John and I made our way to the gangway, and then using the map that Bermudaful had sent with my electronic ticket, I went to the meeting place indicated. Our minibus and guide were nowhere to be found. I started to have flashbacks of a similar screwup in Peru. I called Viator, and they in turn called Bermudaful. Happily, I was immediately contacted by the tour operator and told exactly where to find the guide. I was relieved!

There were about ten or so people in our group. Our guide was a rather portly bearded guy named Mark. He was a good guide. His family had lived in Bermuda for several generations, and he seemed to know just about everything about the island. I learned a lot from him.

Bermuda appears to be an island when you look at it on a map, but a closer inspection shows it to be an archipelago. There are in fact 181 islands in the chain. The main island, also called Bermuda, is the largest, it is is connected by bridges to eight other islands. The islands are in part the remnants of ancient volcanoes with extensive limestone formations created by calcium-secreting algae. There are coral reefs, especially around the northern part of Bermuda. Although it rains regularly, Bermuda has no lakes or rivers. As a result, the islands were uninhabited when European first discovered it in the 16th century.

The Portuguese were probably the first to set foot in Bermuda. The Spanish also checked it out, and the islands take their names from the Spanish explorer Juan de Bermúdez. Neither group thought Bermuda worth claiming for their respective crowns. The British settled Bermuda by accident. The Sea Venture, a ship sent to relieve the Jamestown colony and replenish its supplies, was blown off course by a storm. The captain, fearing the complete loss of life and property, ran the ship aground on the reef. When other British ships came by months later, they carried news of the situation and Jamestown and the Sea Venture’s passengers decided to stay in Bermuda rather than to continue to Virginia. From that point on, Bermuda became an English colony. There was some attempt to raise tobacco in the early days, but it was vastly inferior to that produced in Virginia. As a result, the plantation system never took root in Bermuda. Following the War of 1812, the British Navy made Bermuda its North Atlantic headquarters, and it remained that until the 1950s.

Our tour began in Dockyard. On the map above, it sticks out like a scorpion’s tail. This is the area that serve the Royal Navy for nearly two hundred years, and the buildings began to fall into disrepair as soon as the English departed. In recent years, however, the harbor carefully dredged for battleships proved to be perfect for much even larger vessels, cruise ships. The buildings have been restored and repurposed to included museums, restaurants, and many stores selling all manner of things to tourists. Some cruise passengers spend their whole time here. We did not. After a brief overview and introduction, Mark took us on the road to Saint George.

We passed the British cemetery as we were leaving the dockyards.

Mark explained to us that most of the dead in this graveyard died from Yellow Fever, not in battle.

We continued on toward Saint George. Mark kept up his informative and often amusing patter. At one point we passed a house painted at least a half dozen different colors. He sighed. “That one belongs to my Aunt Patty. She couldn’t decide what colors she wanted so she used all of them.” Sadly we were going too fast for me to get a good picture.

After about a half hour of driving we stopped at a beach. Bermuda has a number of lovely beaches. They are particularly famous for the flecks of pink in the sand the sand, the crumbled exoskeletons of some kind of coral.

Saint George is the original settlement on the island, and it is beautifully preserved. Mark told us that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an honor I think is bestowed too frequently but is probably deserved here. He showed us Saint Peter’s, an Anglican church which is the oldest Protestant congregation in North America.

Mark noted that while the Anglican church has a quasi-established status in Bermuda, relatively few Bermudans are Anglican. The African Methodist Episcopal church is the largest denomination on the island, and the Roman Catholic Church is the second biggest.

Most of the buildings in the center of Saint George are cafes or gifts shops, though there are a few signs that there is a real community here. The coral-colored town hall cannot be missed.

John and I had lunch at a small café. After that, we just wandered about. We admired some of the colonial buildings, all painted in bright colors.

I notice a small sign for a small alley. There was nothing special down there.

I wondered if “Old Maid” was some kind of euphemism for a prostitute. It’s hard to imagine any community filled with sailors where there was not a ready supply of hired female company.

From Saint George, we drove on to the capital, Hamilton. My guess is that at least half the population of Bermuda lives here. Most of Hamilton is not particularly charming, though Front Street along the waterfront is cute.

Hamilton is the commercial hub of Bermuda, and the main business here is reinsurance. For reasons that were not completely clear to me, Bermuda is now the center of the international reinsurance industry. I am sure that that favorable tax rates and a favorable regulatory environment are probably the key to it.

Our final stop for the day was the Gibbs Hill lighthouse. Because of the reefs surrounding Bermuda, it has been the source of many shipwrecks over the centuries. The lighthouse was important to protecting shipping. It’s attractive enough as lighthouse go.

And it does give a view of the rest of the island. John admired the cluster of islands in the Great Sound. These obviously have some of the most expensive real estate in Bermuda.

You can also see the Fairmont Hotel from here.

This was the largest hotel in Bermuda, and it was the most fashionable place to stay in Bermuda during its tourism heyday in the 1960s. Mr. and Mrs. Howatt might have stayed there! It changed ownership just before the COVID lockdown, and when the pandemic began all the staff was dismissed. It has not yet reopened.

After a short drive we were back at the Royal Naval Dockyard. We all thanked Mark profusely for giving us such an overview of Bermuda. It does not seem quite as romantic as it did when I was a child, but real places with real people are always more interesting than fantasies.

We have four sea days ahead of us as we head towards the Azores. I’ll post some pictures of the ship soon.

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.

When I was young, Sunday was still considered to be a day of rest. Most businesses were closed. Traffic was light, except in the summer when there was a line of cars headed to the park or the beach. When I would visit my family in Massachusetts, where the blue laws were still strictly enforced, grocery stores could only sell eggs, milk, and juice on Sunday mornings. Most of the store was closed off and a narrow passage led to the refrigerator unit where those few legal items were found. I rather doubt that New York was ever this strict about Sundays, and there certainly is no lack of commerce on Sundays in Manhattan now. Still, somehow this Sunday managed to be for us an old-fashioned day of rest and reflection.

I started my day by going to Mass. Staying in Midtown we were not that far from Saint Patrick’s, but I have never much cared for the cathedral. It has always felt like a kind of gothic airplane hangar, and with tourists wandering about and chatting it is impossible to pay attention to the small figures in the front. I much prefer Church of Our Savior on Park Avenue in Murray Hill. The building is lovely; the liturgy reverent, but not fussy; the sermons thoughtful, but not too long; and the music is simply outstanding.

John was in bed watching television when I came back from church. We do not bounce back from late night adventures the way that we once did. He asked me to get him a coffee. I had noticed a TomNTom’s Coffee across the street, as well as a Paris Baguette at the end of the block. Both are big Korean chains, and each have many locations in Koreatown, our old neighborhood, and seeing them me oddly nostalgic for Los Angeles. The 37th Street TomNTom’s turned out to be a clothing store as well as a coffee shop, and its franchise owner was Dominican, not Korean. She and I had a wonderful talk about the area while she made me John his cappuccino. We laughed about how the New York television stations were so hysterical about a 4.7 earthquake, which would barely make the news on the West Coast.

After he had his coffee, John tossed some clothes on, and we went out for a walk. We talked about seeing another play but could not make any real decisions. There are quite a lot of the usual shows on Broadway, but we have either seen them before, sometimes more than once, or they are productions like A Beautiful Noise or Six that hold little interest for us. John had some interest in Appropriate, one of the few straight plays, but it seemed like just another dreary Southern family drama to me.

After walking for a while, John was feeling a little dizzy. He saw a pedicab, one of those rickshaws pulled by a bicycle and a ride appealed to him. The driver asked where he wanted to go, and John indicated he wanted to go to the World Trade Center memorial site. I did the math and knew it would be an astronomical fare, but John seemed to have his heart set on it, and I did not have the heart to tell him no. Besides, by this time I figured we were not going to make it to the theater district, so we were saving some money there.

It was a pleasant trip through Chelsea, SoHo, and Tribeca. Few cities have such clearly defined neighborhood, each with its own personality, as New York. Having spent time in each one of these over the past few decades, the change from one to another seemed like meeting an old acquaintance. The driver left us near the new tower and presented me with the bill. I winced – I have paid less for two tickets to the theater – but handed him my American Express card and thanked him for forty minutes of hard pedaling.

In late August 2001, John and I flew in a small plane for New York to Portland, Maine. It was early evening, and the Bombardier jet flew up the Hudson right past the Twin Towers. I had always thought the World Trade Center to be some of the ugliest architecture in Manhattan, but somehow in that golden light of a late summer sunset, they almost looked beautiful. Nobody had any idea that two weeks later they would be gone.

I have always wanted to find the September 11 memorial more affecting than I do. The two huge fountains are impressive enough but to me they fail to convey the extraordinary tragedy of that day. The chairs lined up in the park in Oklahoma City do a much better job of telling people that something terrible, truly terrible, once happened here.

The last time we were here, the Occulus, the transit hub for the subway lines and the PATH trains, was not quite finished. I was curious to see what it looked like now that it was done. From a distance, it looks impressive enough, though I cannot see the point of creating this huge superstructure that looks like the bleached bones of some enormous sea creature. I suppose it is a nod to the great train stations of the previous century, though again I never understood why the Detroit train station was supposed to look like the Baths of Caracalla. It is good for tourist pictures, though.

The Occulus was one of the most expensive public works projects in the history of New York. Sadly, I think they could have spent a little more. The interior spaces are covered in some kind of textured stucco painted white instead of sheathed in metal. Up close it is already starting to look a little dirty and institutional.

Since it was a Sunday afternoon in New York, John wanted to go to a gay bar. For those of you unfamiliar with the traditions, gay bars often had tea dances or happy hours on Sunday. We figured that if any place would be upholding the old ways it would be Julius’s on Tenth Street. Like the Stonewall Inn, this is a venerable spot for gay history. In 1963, New York law made it illegal for a bar to serve known homosexuals. The Mattachine Society, the oldest gay civil rights group, held a “sip in” in Julius’s to challenge this rule. A couple dozen gay men, all white, and all dressed in coat and tie, sat down at the bar, calmly announced that they were gay and ordered drinks.

The crowd at Julius’s is older, and there might still be one or two of the guys who sat at the bar in 1963 still sitting there now. It was crowded though we did manage to find a seat. I had a beer and we ordered some onion rings. We did not stay long, but it was nice to know that some things still stay the same in a city where things change all the time.

We pondered going to see a film in the evening, but most of the theaters were showing the same stuff we could see in Medford. There were a few small theaters with some foreign and independent offerings, but I knew all these films would show up in a couple weeks on Amazon Prime and frankly they would be just as good on the big TV in our bedroom at home. So, we went to a small Chinese restaurant around the corner. Decent Chinese food is something we cannot get at home, so we decided to enjoy some here in New York where it is so wonderfully abundant.

John has been dealing with chest congestion on and off for the past few months. I do not need to give a complete medical history, but there is a good chance that he had some kind of pneumonia earlier this winter. So when he started cough again, we decided that maybe it would be a good idea to stop by urgent care before we boarded the ship.

Urgent care is readily available in New York though a number of small clinics. We went to the City MD facility down by Penn Station. I figured on a Saturday it would not be too busy and he was seen right away. The PA was quite pleasant and happy to prescribe an antibiotic and a cough medication. It was right next door to a CVS where the pleasant pharmacy tech filled it right away. Coming from Ashland where Rite Aid can take a week to do even a routine refill, this seemed astonishing.

It was about noon when our medical adventures were done, and after we left the pharmacy, we walked into a nearby hotel that looked like it might have an interesting Art Deco lobby.

The interior decoration was not sadly that interesting – I wondered if it had once been more elaborate – but we spotted what looked like a classic New York diner through a door on the far side of the lobby. We walked in to just take a peek, but they seated us before we even had time to protest that we really were not all that hungry.

The décor of the café was fun.

The food was not particularly good, though it was served in near record time.

We grabbed a cab to go to the Hudson Theatre on 44^th Street. Almost all the New York cabs support the Curb app. This allows you to electronically hail a cab, just as you would book an Uber, though we have not needed to use that. More helpful to us is that it provides an electronic record of the cab route and an automatic way to pay the fare. This eliminates the frequent issues we used to have with cabs where they would only take cash and somehow could not make change.

Merrily We Roll Along was first staged in 1981. The story itself was an update of a play of the same name by George Kaufman and Moss Hart. That play was the story of a Richard Niles, a playwright who had abandoned his early idealism to write silly light comedies for the Broadway stage. The story was told in reverse order with the first scenes set in 1934 and the last ones just before the First World War. Sondheim, collaborating with George Furth on the book, changed the main character from a playwright to a composer named Franklin Shepard. As in the Kaufman and Hart play, the main characters had two friends, here Charley Kringis, Franklin’s lyricist and dramatic collaborator, and Mary Flynn, a novelist who later sells out to become a drama critic. Shepard, the most important of the three, turns his back on writing agit-prop leftist drama, to writing hit Broadway musicals and then directing movies. And again, just as Kaufman and Hart did, the story is told in reverse order, here beginning in 1980 and ending in 1958.

Unlike most of Sondheim’s shows, Merrily We Roll Along was not a success with either critics or audiences. Sondheim and various directors have reworked parts of the show over the years. This production continues that effort to make this show work. I liked the set, particularly the way that the orchestra was placed in a penthouse above the stage.

The part of Franklin is played in this production by Jonathan Groff, the actor who made such a splash by playing George III in Hamilton. He is perfect for the part in every way, not least because he looked so much like Gavin Newsome. That made it so believable that he would cheat on his wife and screw over his friends. The part of Charley was given to Daniel Radcliffe who gave an acceptable performance, but he was clearly outclassed in every way by the other actors.

After the play, we took a cab back to the hotel. There was a German restaurant right down the street, and going to a south German style beer hall seemed like, well, it’s just not something you can find in a Medford strip mall.

Reichenbach Hall caters, I think, to large parties of people in their twenties and thirties who like to drink a lot. At one point we saw two giant skis brought out with large water glasses attached to them. I somehow think that the water glasses were probably filled with Jägermeister. Two groups of people lined up each behind a glass. At a signal the skis were flipped and the teams competed to see who could guzzle the liquor the fastest.

John and I shared a mixed bratwurst plate and a salad. Both were quite good.

In the evening we returned to the theater district to see Lempicka, a new musical about the notorious socialite and Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka. Even if the name is not familiar, you have probably seen her work.

Many years ago John and I saw a show about her at the American Legion Hall in Hollywood about her relationship with the Italian aristocrat and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. That episode of her life was not covered in this production which instead focused on her relationship with women. Lempicka definitely had a number of lesbian relationships, but the effort in this show to recast her as a kind of queer heroine seemed somewhat forced.

The show, which had been workshopped in Williamstown and La Jolla, had a lot of energy. Sadly, it did not have any memorable tunes.

By the time Lempicka was over it was past eleven, way too late for these two seniors. We found a cab and made our way back to our digs on 37th Street.

After a breakfast that was dreadful, even by the generally low standards of chain hotel cuisine, John and I went out to explore our neighborhood a bit. We are on 37th Street, just off Fifth, not far from the Library and Bryant Park. Another famous landmark in our neighborhood is a certain department store, already decorated for a spring that has not quite yet arrived in New York City.

It still has a sign proudly declaring it to be the WORLD’S LARGEST STORE though one suspects that the more accurate boast may soon be LAST REMAINING MACY’S. There were no shortage of people inside the store taking pictures of the decorations, but not any business I could see at the cash registers.

Across the street at discounter H&M things were pretty busy. John was looking for a light sports coat, though the ones he found were suitable for only people much shorter than he and much skinnier than me. We walked through Urban Outfitters and a couple other places before he announced that he had had enough shopping and was not feeling all that great. So I took him back to the hotel room.

I left him to run some errands. We had left his blood pressure cuff at home, so I went to the nearest CVS to find one for the trip. Last time I was in New York the shoplifting epidemic was devastating the drug stores and almost everything was locked up. It seemed more normal this time, and the security guards at the door looked like typical employees and not Blackwater contractors. After finding the cuff, I went up to find us tickets for Merrily We Roll Along. Although this revival of Stephen Sondheim’s most problematic play is not a huge hit, I knew that I could not expect to find discounted tickets for it. Mission accomplished, I went back to the hotel.

John was feeling a little better, and he was happy I had tickets for tomorrow’s matinee, though a little appalled at how much I had paid. I knew that he also wanted to see the newest version of The Who’s Tommy. About twenty-five years ago we had seen the original version of this a the La Jolla Playhouse before it went to Broadway. I knew that there would be tickets for this at the TKTS booth in Times Square, so I braced myself for a long wait in line there. John did not have to be talked into letting me do this by myself.

It was not as bad as it could have been. I was only in line for about an hour and I chatted with a guy from Connecticut who did recruiting for Raytheon. All my time at Mountain Meadows has taught me a little about making small talk with people with whom I have almost nothing in common.

Neither of us were particularly wowed by this new version of the the 1969 rock opera. The story creaks, particularly as a depiction of autism, though that term is never used. The new lead, Ali Louis Bourzgui, is certainly quite talented.

Hopefully, John will be feeling a bit better tomorrow and we will have more theater adventures.

I flew for the first time when I was five years old. My parents, fretting that I was too attached to my mother to survive in school, decided that I should spend the summer in rural Massachusetts with my grandmother, a rather severe relic of the Victorian era, whose task, as she saw it, was to rectify all the mistakes that my mother had made with her new permissive childrearing. But back to the airplane. I was an unaccompanied minor, four years old, and the entire flight crew was determined I should have the most wonderful time I could. They hovered over me with everything a chubby young boy could possibly want to eat, and I took a trip up to the cockpit where I sat on the pilot’s lap and pretended to fly the plane. It was magical. I adored flying.

It is not so wonderful anymore, and flying is something I endure rather than enjoy. The seats are small, the refreshments dreary, and the flight attendants are scarcely more charming than my grandmother. But I will not spend much time complaining about our flights from Medford to New York. Instead, I have to tell you that John Pratt did an amazing job. He was up at three in the morning to get ready to go to the airport. He walked half the length of the Denver airport when we had to change planes and the wheelchair people did not show up. And when something similar happened at LaGuardia, he schlepped luggage from the carousel to the cab. He was a trouper!

We are staying in a Marriot in midtown. Price have gone up for accommodation in New York since the last time we were here just a little over a year ago. Our room here is quite small. The best thing about it is the view from our window.

It doesn’t get much more New York than this.

No theater today. We’re too tired. We’ll check out some shows tomorrow.

After spending a good bit of time trying to figure out a way to get out of Hidden Hill Gardens without going back the way we had entered, John and I made it to North End Way, one of the streets that run through Hampstead Heath. We saw The Old Bull and Bush Tavern, a public house that proudly announced it dated back to 1721. 

It had an outdoor patio, and we were hungry. Lunch was in order, and, I am pleased to say, it was quite a good one. Afterwards, we did not feel like walking back to the Underground station on the high street, so we took an Uber back to Leicester Square. 

In the evening we went to see the Aaron Sorkin version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Late summer is not the best time to go to London to see theater. Most of what is on at this point are the big musicals that have been running for decades like Les Miserable, Lion King, or Phantom. We had no desire to revisit any of those and what was new largely seemed pretty lame. We thought about the revival of Anything Goes, but Sutton Foster had left the production and I know just about every line of that play. So, we settled on Mockingbird. 

This version of the story follows Harper Lee’s story fairly closely, but the dialogue and the sensibility are distinctly those of Sorkin. I have never been a fan of his work – I found The West Wing intolerably smug and irritating – and this play did not turn me into an admirer. He casts adult actors in the roles of the children. According to the reviews I read, this was supposedly because they were reflecting on the events from a later time in their lives. I did not particularly see that. 

Tomorrow we leave London to visit our friends in Hampshire.