It’s spring break and we’re on the road again.  Or at least 3/5 of us are.  Zoe and Nadia are focused on wrapping up their semesters and preparing for finals, but the rest of us decided to head south.  Lanie never got to go on her 8th grade trip to DC due to Covid, and we have beloved friends and family in the area who we haven’t seen in way too long, so that’s our primary destination.

Unfortunately the first requirement for a road trip is a car, and we have encountered some challenges in this area.  We expected to take our “new” car (a seven-year-old Honda Fit) but after a deer collision in late January we are STILL waiting

for repairs to be completed (local readers, avoid Midway Collision!)  The trusty old minivan has acquired a distinctive aroma after Bob spilled some kind of weird lamp oil in there a couple of years ago — plus we had loaned it to Zoe at Easter so she would have room to move herself out of her apartment at the end of the semester.  This left us with the kid car — a 90s-era Pontiac Vibe with close to 200,000 miles and a lack of such modern features as power locks and power windows.  We figured that even if it made the trip successfully, we’d be taking years off its life.  So, we’re traveling in a Nissan Sentra rental car with Maine plates.  (The guy at Enterprise said, “Well, it’s better than if people thought you were from Massachusetts!”  Massachusetts drivers don’t have the best reputation.)

 

Our first stop was a visit to Nadia, who is conveniently on the way.  We picked her up late on Friday and headed to an airbnb in Mount Vernon, which is between where she lives (in Pleasantville) and the city.  There were a lot of logistical complications involving getting her back home again on the train and having a place to park our car, so this seemed like the best solution.  It turned out to be a great spot — spacious and easy to get to, with easy parking and a 15-minute walk to the Metro North to take us into the city on Saturday.

Our first mission was coffee and bagels, which we accomplished without too much trouble.  Luckily we found ourselves right by the NYC Public Library, so we ate in the little park there and then took a quick trip inside.  I love the Hogwarts-style reading rooms and the ornate ceilings.  The girls particularly loved the gift shop.  We came out with a couple of posters in a cardboard tube (which would later provide a fun challenge to protect as we walking long distances in pouring rain).

We made our way over to Hudson Yards to meet our friend Justin for lunch.  This is a large mall-type area with very high end stores.  Luckily Zoe, never a big fan of shopping, did not have to suffer through it.  The other girls enjoyed a little browsing even though there was zero chance that we’d be making any purchases.  We had lunch at a cool place called Mercado Spain, with lots of kiosks selling different types of Spanish foods.  We tried a fancy kind of Jamon (apparently from pigs that ate only acorns or something like that), sandwiches, Spanish pizza, churros, and some desserts.  It was a great success apart from when I tried to order horchata as a treat for us to share, and was instead given a tiny cup of espresso (“cortado”).

It was a lovely spring day and we spent some time walking the High Line park with Justin and his wife Robyn, enjoying the sunshine despite the mobs of people.  We got down as far as Little Island, the quirky new park built entirely on concrete tulip-like supports (see photo at top).  Zoe and I came here in December and had the place pretty much to ourselves, but today it was wall to wall people.  We persevered and fought our way to the top for views across the water and to the Statue of Liberty.

We can always count on Justin, a born and bred New Yorker, to show us something that we never would have found on our own.  This time it was a “sample sale” (a misleading name, according to Justin) for jewelry.  You had to be on a special mailing list to get an invitation, but fortunately Justin and Robyn frequent lots of these sales so they brought us along.  We had to check our bags then go up to a big room, empty except for a large square jewelry counter in the center.  They broke us into pairs and assigned us each our own salesperson, who followed us around on the other side of the counter, helping us look at and try on anything that interested us.  The jewelry was beautiful, and 70% off the sticker price — but however good a deal it was, 70% off of four-figure jewelry was still not something the Pavlik familly was likely to purchase.  Nadia and I had a whispered consultation on whether it was more polite to just breeze by and not look at anything, or to give our jewelry minders false hope by trying on jewelry that we had no hope of purchasing.  Luckily we eventually found some more reasonably-priced items that we were at least willing to try on.  (Our salespeople then followed us around hopefully with them on a velvet tray as we finished our circuit.)  I had to talk Nadia out of a $200 necklace, but Bob and Lanie did make a secret purchase that I think I may see next month.  Regardless it was an interesting experience that we definitely have never had before.

We said goodbye to Justin and Robyn and headed to an old favorite, Kung Fu Kitchen noodle house, also recommended by Justin.  We had a little time between dinner and our entertainment for the evening, the Broadway show Peter Pan Goes Wrong.  We mostly filled this time with a frustrating and ultimately fruitless search for a public bathroom near Times Square.

Bob and I saw The Play That Goes Wrong last summer and laughed ourselves silly, so we were thrilled to find tickets to this sister production that just opened a couple of weeks ago.  And for the first few weeks it is featuring guest star Neil Patrick Harris!  We all laughed for two hours straight, while admiring the amazing talents of the cast and crew.

By the time we got out, the rain had begun.  It should have been a fairly quick walk back to Grand Central, but (a) we went the wrong direction, and (b) I was attempting to shield our posters by keeping the long stiff cardboard tube beneath my raincoat, which greatly hampered any kind of quick movement.  (Lanie, who was the one who had bought the posters, found this all very amusing.)  Luckily through some good luck and superhuman effort we made the 10:38 train with about five seconds to spare.  Less luckily, it was still raining when we got back to Mount Vernon and had to face the 15-minute walk back to our place.  Let’s just say that moods had soured a bit by that point.  But we made it eventually and as far as I am aware the posters are still dry (which is more than you can say for our shoes).

 

 

 

We like to think of ourselves as well-traveled.  I mean, Jen has scratched off almost all the states on her lotto map that are east of the Mississippi and not the deep south.  So it’s a suprise when we find new place relatively nearby that is worth visiting.

Tarrytown, NY, was not on our radar before Nadia signed up for a field hockey clinic/college visit nearby.  Jen did her typical quality research and planning — and, aside from a puzzling lack of in-town accommodations, things looked promising.   There was talk of some walking opportunities and some downtown quaintness.

Through a frustratingly difficult booking process she managed to get us a room in the only hotel (or inn, or B&B, or anything resembling a place we could stay) near the downtown area, and we were ready to go.

It should be noted that this was supposed to be a Jen and Nadia trip. Then only a few days before departure, the school district lifted the quarantine requirements for people traveling out of New England, which meant I could go without having to affect my on-site work schedule.  Jen had to work her magic with the frustrating hotel booking process to extend our stay and double our occupancy.

And then we were ready to go.

And go we did!

From Jen:

Those readers of a certain age may remember that Tarrytown was the home of Washington Irving, and the setting for the famous stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”.  I’m considering my daughters’ education incomplete, since both claimed to have never heard of Ichabod Crane or the Headless Horseman.  I tried to play an audio recording of the story on the way down, but Nadia immersed herself in her headphones and Lanie claimed to only understand about half of what the narrator was saying.  (The story was considerably denser, and written in much more flowery language, than I remembered.  It’s very possible that my fond memories come from an eighties animated special or something, rather than the actual text.  Still, it gave me a thrill of nostalgia to hear the long-forgotten but still familiar names: Katrina Van Pelt!  Bram Bones!)

Anyway, we arrived at the Sleepy Hollow Inn and Resort Center late Friday night.  It was not an especially nice hotel, and initially didn’t seem to be in the most appealing area, on a busy four-lane road.  It was very close to the Hudson, but there was no actual view or access, so the benefit from that was limited.  However, it proved to have one major advantage, at least for Bob and I — the hidden ability to walk to lots of cool places.

On Saturday morning we had to drop Nadia off at Pace University for her field hockey clinic. (This proved to be a bit of an adventure, since Apple maps led us to a random intersection in the middle of White Plains rather than the actual campus.  Fortunately we’d allowed plenty of time.) She’s been talking to the coach at Pace and we were hoping to do a tour while there, but with the coronavirus situation found it to be a bit of a prison state.  We all had to fill out an online questionnaire on our phones and display our green check mark to the guard to even be allowed to drive onto the campus.  (Bob accidentally filled out some question wrong and got a red X instead, so he stayed at the hotel with Lanie.)  Nadia had to go straight to the field, and parents were not even allowed to leave the car.  We got a brief driving tour while attempting to find the field, and it did appear to be quite a nice campus.

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, after leaving Nadia the other three of us started on our first walking trip — onto the Mario Cuomo (formerly Tappan Zee) bridge.  It was only about half a mile from our hotel, and had a lovely walking/biking path along the side, with frequent viewing areas overlooking the Hudson and Tarrytown.  (It also had nice tall sturdy barriers between the traffic and the walkers, and the walkers and the edge, and so was much

less terrifying than my earlier experience walking the Golden Gate bridge with my friend Charles many years ago.)  We didn’t have time to do the whole ~8 mile round trip — plus Lanie had chosen fashion over form and worn shoes that always give her blisters — but we made it more than halfway.

 

After that we took a quick trip into downtown Tarrytown for lunch.  It was a cute, lively downtown — similar to our own Portsmouth.  And we found delicious brick oven pizza by the slice, which was just right for our tight timeframe to pick up Nadia.

In the afternoon, our lame children unaccountably wanted to stay in the hotel room and watch reruns of The Office and Despicable Me for the eight hundreth time, so Bob and I set off without them on our next walking adventure.  We’d seen something called the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail on the map, passing very close to our hotel.  We were picturing some kind of wooded path, but it

A little way after passing through Lyndhurst, we came to

the road leading to Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s estate.  We walked down to check it out, but unfortunately found that to be closed as well.  The grounds looked to be extensive and again, worth exploring on another day.

Eventually the trail led us into the village center of Irvington, another charming town center with shops and restaurants leading down to the river.  (I always love small towns, like our own Durham, that are safe and accessible enough to have groups of middle school kids wandering around town, buying ice cream and enjoying the nice weather.)  We stopped at an organic juicery for a drink before starting on the log walk back.  (We thought we could make a loop and walk back long the RiverWalk trail, right on the banks of the river, but unfortunately were blocked when we got to the Lyndhurst boundary.)

 

 

For dinner I had contemplated yet another walk along the Tarrytown river path, but even Bob and I were running out of steam by that point.  We settled for driving to a park on the

river and walking a short way to the picturesque lighthouse before heading into town for dinner.  (Well, most of us did.  Nadia refused to leave the car.)

 

And we weren’t even done yet!  Bob and I wanted to see the bridge lit up at night, so took one more walk a short way out before the walking path closed at 10.  The colorfully-lit bridge reminded us of the Zakim Bridge in Boston.

The next morning we packed up and headed southwest (driving across the bridge this time) to Drew University in New Jersey.  We were able to meet up with an assistant field hockey coach and a couple of players, who gave us a nice tour of the lovely campus (despite the rainy weather).  It seems like a great place — the campus is wooded and beautiful, the adjacent town is quaint and lively, and you can hop on a train and be in Manhattan in 30 minutes.

We had contemplated some other kind of activity in the afternoon, but the weather put a damper on everyone’s spirits and we decided to just have an early lunch and then tackle the five-hour drive home — rejuvenated with the thrill of having actually GONE SOMEWHERE.