October 10, 2025
Earlier this summer I went to New York City for the first time. I'd gotten close before; I'd gone to an Ingress Mission Day in Hoboken back before COVID, but I'd never been to the city itself. TL;DR: I liked it.
Some friends and I took a long weekend, driving up on a Friday and hitting Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. That pretty much took up the day; we checked into our hotel and had dinner and that was that. All in all it was a good experience, though if I had it all to do again I might have waited for the elevator to the observation deck instead of about ten stories worth of steps. We unfortunately didn't get much time at Ellis Island since we had to get the ferry over to Liberty Island before it closed. But what we did see was interesting. Might be worth another visit at some point just to see the whole thing and maybe pay the extra to go higher up on the statue.
On Saturday my friend wanted to see the Met Cloisters, which I had never heard of. They're a collection of religious artifacts going back hundreds of years, in a park pretty far uptown -- the closest subway stops are either Van Dyck, or 190th Street. We gave ourselves a bit more time here, and got to see everything. We also learned that a ticket to the cloisters is also a ticket to the main Met down in Central Park so afterwards we headed down there to take a look around.
We didn't get quite so much time there, mostly because that main museum is friggin' huge, but there was some really neat stuff there. That's definitely one to take a full day for if you go. After that it was getting a bit far into the afternoon so we went to Belvedere "Castle" in Central Park, which used to be a weather observation station. We looped around Turtle Pond to get there, and after that took the bus back to Midtown to catch our shuttle back over to New Jersey and the hotel.
And that was basically it: Sunday we had breakfast with my friend's friend, then drove back. Overall it was barely a sample pack of what NYC has to offer, but if I ever need a vacation that doesn't involve an intercontinental flight, it'll be near the top of my list of destinations. Still plenty to see and do there.
