It’s been over a year since Free Range Hobo has seen a blog post about travel… I wish I could say I’d been going on some wild adventures and just hadn’t had time to tell you all about them… but realistically only half of that is true. I haven’t had a lot of time to tell you about any adventures… and I also haven’t had many adventures. This stems from a variety of sources, first and foremost I’ve been traveling to places I’ve been before and blogged about many times (California, Ireland, etc.,), and from an adventuring perspective my drive had been a little dead for a bit here. Work trips where I’d normally try to add days or side-quests simply became a work-hotel routine until I flew home again… and travel was becoming routine. That all changed this year, and over the past six months I’ve been interested in traveling again.Most of you know that my long-time travel companion, Jen, got married last year. This put somewhat of a damper on my normal routine for travel (not that I am not happy for Jen and her fantastic better-half, Josh! I am overjoyed, still!). Traveling alone is always an option for me, but the more I travel the more I find that I have the most fun when I’m going with someone else. I love building experiences, sharing perspectives, enjoying all this world has to offer with other people. And this is where Abby came in.Yes, this Abby:
Abby (left) in 1999, when we went to Europe together
It had been years since we’d talked in person, though we’d kept in touch, but just one sushi dinner earlier this year and suddenly we were talking a lot about all sorts of things… one being travel. Abby wants to go to Hungary next summer, and I’m hoping we go together. This sparked all sorts of talk about traveling with others (Abby has mostly been a solo traveler), and how we would travel together. I suggested we try a trip over Christmas, something simple and somewhere we’d both been before… and eventually we settled on New York. This however, would be a bit of a different trip that my past ones. We both reached out to friends who had moved to New York City, lived there, grew up there, or had connections in the city. Where do the locals go? What would you do on a typical Friday or weekend? What are the “must hit” spots that we may otherwise miss?
We coupled this with a few staples, The Met for me (and Café Sabarsky of course!), and the International Museum of Mathematics for Abby, and a trip to a Green Bay Packers Bar to watch a football game with similarly-minded fans, and we had our tickets bought and hotel booked.We left the day after Christmas, December 26th, and I used points I’ve earned from work to book flights and hotel in Midtown. I figured no matter what we ended up doing (we went with almost no plans at all, really save for the above)… midtown is named aptly because it’s right in the center if Manhattan, we’d be about the same distance from everything, and we’d just find places near our main attractions to fill the days if we wanted. We also stayed east of Times Square… we were flying out the day of New Years Eve, and it was going to be a madhouse. This fact would actually frame our trip a lot more than we realized initially… but overall didn’t cause us large amounts of concern just some overcrowding issues when trying to get back through the streets to the hotel.
So, let’s dive into the days themselves… no point in over-explaining before we even get there. We left about midday after Christmas, with a slightly delayed flight out… and landed around 6PM at La Guardia airport. We took a cab to The Lexington Hotel at 48th street and Lexington, checked in… and got ready to head out.
I should explain here that Abby is a HUGE Green Bay Packers fan. For the uninitiated… there are “Packers Bars” all over the world where fans of the team (for whatever reason, either birth, adoption, or just the love of the quarterback [which is why I’m a fan]) can congregate together to enjoy a game. In New York, the most popular by far is a bar called Kettle of Fish. I’d looked this up in advance, actually this was a stipulation Abby had put on travel (see? Told you she’s a fan!) that we find a “real” Packers bar, but we thought that a Thursday night would be a perfect time to go and “scope out” the bar. Would they have game audio playing? Were they a true Packers bar? There was only one way to find out.
We elected to walk from the hotel at 48th street to the bar somewhere west and down around 9th. At the same time, we should pass the Math Museum (hereafter: MoMath) on the path and we’d get a good number of “steps” during the walk (we’d both invested in a FitBit recently and had been challenging each other). The weather was unseasonably warm for December (about 40 degrees) with no snow or rain, so we took off toward 5th avenue and began our walk across town.We passed all sorts of things as we walked up 48th street west across Manhattan. Rockefeller Center is at 49th, so we saw the crowds that were gathering and commented that we were glad we weren’t closer (it would take me all of a day to forget this). We saw some shopfronts on 5th before heading down towards the most-influential blocks of Broadway and Time Square. We eventually made it to MoMath, and got a picture by the door. We’d be coming back the next morning:
We walked onward, breaking the 15K step mark for the day and making it to Kettle of Fish where we sat and played cribbage on an older cribbage board where the pieces had gone missing and matchsticks sufficed for scoring. If you’ve never played cribbage… you should! I just started playing about two days before the trip… and I’m enjoying it a great deal!
This picture of Kettle of Fish is actually from the next Sunday afternoon when the game was on… but you get the idea and more on that later!
We joked with the bartenders, tipped more than we should, and made sure that they’d remember us come Sunday. We wanted a seat at the bar (half of which is reserved for the long-term regulars at the bar, the bartender Adrian said), and learned we’d have to show up early around 10:30 AM for a 1PM game on Sunday. This was early, sure, but we are dedicated, and the Packers are in the playoffs this year… there’s no better time to support the team! Abby deemed the bar legitimate from our conversations, the decorations, and the vibe, and we decided we’d be back on Sunday.
As we left, it was clear that the weather was just too cold to walk back, and I helped us hail a cab to get back to the hotel without freezing. We collapsed into bed and slept deeply. Tomorrow was the Math Museum, and so much more.
