Is it just me, or does anyone else get creeped out by the bizarre knock-off Mickey rides often found outside bodegas around New York? I have no idea why it’s automatically delightful whenever Disney anthropomorphizes animals, and I know this is the exact same idea…but something just feels off about it. Also, the idea of…
There’s a guy. We’ll call him Alex. Alex owns a store underneath an elevated subway platform in Brooklyn. Alex’s store sells merchandise of a certain ilk: knock-off colognes, cheap luggage, bootleg DVD’s, overpriced 99 cent store items, etc. He’s as sleazy as you can imagine, and is clearly taking advantage of a clientele that doesn’t…
Continuing my search for a usable elevator in Greenpoint, my boss had given me a few addresses to check out, and as I approached 61 Greenpoint, I noticed a really great building detail I’ve never seen before… Lining the top floor windows are rows… …of pencils! Why Pencils? 61 Greenpoint was once part of the…
I was searching for elevator options around the northern part of Greenpoint when I came to that little park at the end of Manhattan Avenue, right along Newtown Creek… …and noticed something through the bushes… A tent! Someone is camping out in Brooklyn! No, I did not find any campfire ashes or s’mores remnants in…
On July 9th, 2010, my girlfriend and I set out from New York City on a cross-country roadtrip. Our plan was simply to get as far west as we could, avoiding the Interstates at all costs. Twenty days and 8,000 miles later, we returned to New York City, having driven through 20 states in total….
From Tennessee, we continued driving into North Carolina, passing through the Great Smoky Mountains – and man were they smokin’ today: The Smokies are named for the fog that rises in early morning hours and after it rains, a result of warm humid air from the Gulf of Mexico cooling in the higher elevation. It…
We left New Orleans following the Great River Road north, which winds along the south side of the Mississippi. While we saw the occasional sugar cane field that once brought tremendous wealth to the state… …most of the horizon was dominated by impossibly ugly petrochemical plants. While brochures may call the route Plantation Alley, it’s…
We’d been hoping to explore San Antonio for the first half of the day, but the speeding ticket we got the previous night threw the whole schedule off. We ended up getting in really late, causing us to wake up really late, and had no choice but to head out toward New Orleans, which was…
It’s pretty amazing to be driving along seeing this out the window… …then taking a slight detour and finding yourself in a drastically different world: When we left Las Cruces, our goal was to make it to San Antonio by the end of the day. We had two routes to choose from: the southern route…
I had a lot of plans for Tucson, but unfortunately, pretty much all of them fell through due to lack of time. For one thing, I was really looking forward to visiting the Titan Missile Museum, where you can tour the only remaining Cold War-era Titan 2 missile launch site in the country. You get…