My dad grew up near near New York City, and my grandparents still live there, and it's not really that far away from southern New Hampshire, so I've been going there fairly regularly all my life. Kierra, however, had never been there before, so last summer, before we got married, we took the train down there so she could meet my grandparents. We went again in May, again by rail. Last weekend, we decided to go visit again, but this time we drove. There are two ways to drive down there. One way is to drive across Massachusetts and Connecticut, through the Bronx and Queens, and out onto Long Island. The second way is to drive south to New London CT, and take the ferry to the eastern point of Long Island, and drive west from there. The second way takes a little longer, but since it avoids New York City, it is a much nicer drive. We decided to take the ferry.
We drove down on Friday, and the weather was very nice. It was windy, so the water was a little choppy, but not too bad. We had a nice voyage across the Long Island Sound aboard the
Susan Anne, arriving on time at Orient Point. After getting off the ferry, we drove to Greenport. The Long Island Railroad was originally chartered to serve as a link on the route between New York and Boston. At the time, southern Connecticut was considered impassible by rail, because of the hills and wide rivers. The solution was to build a railroad to the eastern end of Long Island, and run a ferry to New London, where people could get on a train to Boston. The railroad line ends on a ferry dock in downtown Greenport, where the Cross Sound Ferries once tied up. However, before the Long Island Railroad was even finished, another railroad was built across southern Connecticut, and the Long Island was never really used as a link on the route to Boston. The railroad was still completed, and now there is a small railroad museum in Greenport, which was visited. From there we drove to Riverhead, where there is a much larger railroad museum. From there we drove to my grandparents' house, arriving in the late afternoon.
On Saturday we went into the city. We took a morning train into Penn Station, and took the subway up to Central Park. We wanted to see Cleopatra's Needle, which is in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is an ancient Egyptian obelisk, around 3,500 years old. It actually has nothing to do with Cleopatra, as it was already over 1,000 years old in her time. Someone gave it that nickname when it was moved to New York, and it stuck. There is an identical obelisk in London, a similar one in Paris, and another identical to the one in Paris is still in Egypt.
After seeing the obelisk, we walked through Central Park. We stopped at the Turtle Pond and watched some of the turtles swimming lazily in the water. We walked over to Belvedere Castle, which is a weather observatory that resembles a castle. We stopped at a street vendor and got some large soft pretzels for lunch. We left the park at Columbus Circle, and walked a few blocks up Broadway to see the LDS temple in Manhattan. After visiting the temple, we got back on the subway.
We got off the subway at the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn. We walked a couple blocks from there to the New York Transit Museum, which I had wanted to visit for a long time, but had never been able to. The museum was very interesting. It explained how the subway tunnels were dug and the dangerous conditions the workers faced. It talked about how the transit authority responded to recent disasters, including the attacks on September 11th, the snowstorm in 2010, and Hurricane Sandy. The museum is located in an old subway station, and is still connected to the subway network. The station houses a fleet of old transit cars, some dating back to the Brooklyn Elevated Railway, before subway tunnels were dug and steam trains ran on elevated structures above the streets. The transit authority restored all of the cars in their own shops at Coney Island, and they are all in operating condition. The museum occasionally runs excursions with them out in the subway network.
After the transit museum, we got back on the subway and went back to Penn Station, where we got the next train back to Mineola. We spent Sunday with my grandparents, and drove back on Monday. Again, we drove out to eastern Long Island and took the ferry. We happened to get the same ferry, the
Susan Anne, on the voyage back to Connecticut. If it were possible, the weather was even better than the previous voyage. The sky was a spectacular shade of blue, and the seas were perfectly calm. There was no haze whatsoever. The voyage, as usual, was too short. After getting off the ferry in New London, we got some lunch and drove to the Submarine Museum, at the naval base in nearby Groton. The museum houses the
Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine ever built. The
Nautilus is famous not only for being the first nuclear submarine, but also for crossing beneath the polar ice cap, and for circling the globe underwater the entire time. She has been converted into a museum, showing what life on board a submarine is like. The movies always show the insides of submarines as very cramped, but they are far more cramped than you see on the screen. I cannot imagine living in such a small space with so many people without so much as a window to look out of for months at a time.
After visiting the Submarine Museum, we drove back home to Nashua.
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| The ferry terminal is right next to the train station in downtown New London CT. |
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| Downtown New London, seen from the stern of the departing Susan Anne. |
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| The end of the railroad line at the ferry dock in Greenport. |
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| An old steam engine on display at the museum in Riverhead. |
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| The lineup of coaches at the museum in Riverhead. |
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| Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. |
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| Belvedere Castle and the Turtle Pond in Central Park. |
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| A turtle swimming in the Turtle Pond in Central Park. |
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| In Central Park, it's easy to forget that you are in the biggest city in the United States. |
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| Some geese landing on The Lake in Central Park. |
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| The lineup of old subway cars at the transit museum. |
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| Plum Gut Light and New London at Orient Point, with Connecticut in the background. |
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| New London approaching Orient Point. |
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| Cape Henlopen on the Thames River in New London. This ferry was originally built to bring military vehicles to Europe as part of the Normandy invasion on D-Day. After the war, she was refurbished to serve as a ferry, and operated in New Jersey before coming to the Long Island Sound. |
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| Nautilus at the submarine museum in Groton, CT. It was too cramped inside the submarine to take a photos of the interior. |
