Strom Travel Diaries

Day 2 – Sunday, October 16

We woke up a little before 7:30 and got ourselves ready for the day. Since we’d walked the High Line on Saturday night, the plan was to get some breakfast and walk around Central Park before going to the Neue Galerie. We decided to walk down towards the park and get breakfast at Carnegie Diner & Cafe. It was huge (‘scuse me, youge). Mom got pancakes and I got scrambled eggs with toast, hash browns, fruit, and bacon. 

After breakfast, we continued on to Central Park, where we walked by the horse-drawn carriages, The Lake, Oak Bridge, The Ramble, King Jagiello Monument, Turtle Pond, The Obelisk, Belvedere Castle, Delacorte Theater, the Shakespeare Garden, the Great Lawn, and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. There were, of course, many people enjoying the park on a Sunday morning. Some of them were part of a run to raise money for breast cancer. It was incredible how many people we would walk by, how much music we’d hear in one place and how quickly it would seem to dissipate as we turned a corner and skirted a lake. Parts of the park seemed so quiet while others seemed to thrum with noise.

While we were walking toward The Obelisk, we saw a small crowd of people with binoculars and cameras. It turned out that there was a Grasshopper Sparrow in the grass! I did my best to get some amateur photos of it.

After about 2 ½ hours in the park we exited at the Engineers’ Gate so we could walk back down Museum Mile. The Cooper Hewitt was catty-corner to the Engineers’ Gate, and we went to the right and passed the Guggenheim. We didn’t go in the Guggenheim as we had originally planned because the spiral ramp and several other galleries were closed to change the installations. Instead, we kept walking to the Neue Galerie. Of course, when we got there, it turned out that most of its galleries were closed for the same reason, but the one gallery with Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, aka The Woman in Gold, was open. So we didn’t spend a ton of time there, but the building itself was beautiful and would definitely be worth a return visit when the rest of it is open.

Since we still had a little over 2 hours before we had to be back at the hotel, we decided to continue down Museum Mile to The Met. Because, why not? If you don’t have a year to explore each gallery in detail, you might as well practically run through the whole thing.

One of my favorite thing about museums is the surprise that comes when you turn a corner and are suddenly confronted with something you had no idea was in the collection. This trip that feeling was a bit reduced since I took a few minutes to do a quick Google search of some “Must See” pieces, like Washington Crossing the Delaware and Van Gogh’s Self Portrait in a Straw Hat. Even so, we still saw some pieces we hadn’t expected, like the Book of the Dead, a cute hippopotamus sculpture (based on all the merch in The Met Store, we weren’t the only ones who liked it), a Tall Clock, and multiple Picassos. We also saved some time to look at a special exhibit entitled “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which showcased large stoneware pottery and face jugs among other works, made in the 19th Century by African American potters in rural South Carolina. 

We left The Met a little after 3 and made our way back through Central Park to our hotel. On this jaunt, we passed some things we hadn’t earlier in the day, like the Loeb Boathouse, Bethesda Fountain and Terrace, and the Central Park Carousel. 

Back at the hotel, we got freshened up for dinner. We ate with a couple of family friends at Gallagher’s, which was just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. Mom had a Caesar salad and Dover sole, while I had a filet mignon with a side of broccoli. No appetizer for Claire since dessert was also on offer! Mom was lucky that chocolate layer cake was so big, because otherwise she might not have gotten any.

We were back in the hotel just before 8, and we were pooped. We had enough energy to do a little repacking and watch “Celebrity Jeopardy” and “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune,” because we have our priorities straight. Then it was a fairly early night because we’d have to be up for our train.