🍎 New York, NY - Saturday
Today's New York City goals were fairly simple: The Dumbo Area, and, The High Line which is located in the Chelsea Area.
I naturally woke up early, around 7am, so I spent the extra time tagging landmarks on the maps in my phone. Willow woke up more around 9am, as planned, to maximize recovering her sore feet from Friday's aftermath. For breakfast, we initially wanted to try the breakfast offerings from the Shinjuku Japanese Deli (more like a mini grocery store), but, those aren't offered on weekends, we were sad to learn. As a backup plan, we walked a little further over to a place called "Hol in the Wall" and everything was awesome. Their sweet potato fries are especially delicious!
With breakfast secured, we went back to the hotel to gather our adventure gear and embark on sightseeing. It turned out that using Uber would cost around 15$ USD, and that using the subway would have been a longer walk (and ultimately actually impossible - we'd learn that later in the evening). I decided to take a shot at using the New York Ferry option to get us from Pier 11 over to the Gumbo Pier. The staff at the pier were wonderful with helping us to board the right ferry – there were lots of routes available, so having asked the staff ultimately saved us a lot of headaches and time.
The heat was turned on fairly high today, too, in the city. Just 15 minutes of sightseeing around Dumbo between the pier and Time Out Market exhausted us already! Originally, I had marked a lot of parks by the river as things to see, but, we totally reduced out scope of landmarks after being blasted by Saturday's heat.
For lunch, we made our way to Kogane Ramen to sample their unique dishes: Lobster Ramen, and, Yaki Ramen (aka: fried ramen). The verdict – too salty.
Next up, using the trusty offline maps GPS app, we successfully used the subway system to make our way to the famous Chelsea Market and discovered a wonderful Frozen Apple Cider (aka: slush drink) up on The High Line in a zone that looks like it's straight out of a manga/anime story – a shopping district on a bridge serving up food and drinks!
At that point, we were very close to a relatively new attraction called "Little Island". It's an amazing park that feels a lot like Limsa Lominsa from Final Fantasy 14. There were winding walkways, stairs, shortcuts, whimsical art pieces, whimsical musical instruments, seats, viewpoints, shops and all sorts of other goodies all packed into a multi-level, built-over-the-water-on-piers public park place. It was a lot of fun to explore.
After hiking all over Little Island, it was time to call it a day and head back to the hotel. That's when the subway system decided to surprise us by switching tracks and turning itself from being an "A"-line (blue) service to being an "F"-line (orange) service due to maintenance work on the tracks in the direction we needed to return to our hotel. Basically, the subway took a detour around the stations that were under maintenance and actually sent us back to the Dumbo area! It was quite a panic really, because as much as the train operators tried to explain things, the speakers on the trains were all garbage and their voices were just too poor to be understandable. I had to turn into a detective on the spot and look for clues to unravel the mystery! It took a lot of facts coming together for me to initially get an idea that something was not working with the "A" line. We had gotten off the "lost" subway at York station to reevaluate the situation. After studying all kinds of quirky facts, and even asking for help from local authorities who weren't all that helpful, I actually solved the problem by asking the GPS app how it would navigate to the hotel using public transportation. It gave the answer: "keep going along the lost A or regular F line to the next station, and then switch to the A line subway that goes back up to the Fulton Street Station. The reason I had strong confidence that the A line stopped at Fulton when going in that direction was because we did that route when going from Dumbo to Chelsea. Ultimately, that proved to be the way home – but, we sure had a major "lost in New York City" moment there!
For dinner, we grabbed some hot meals at that nearby Shinjuku Japanese Deli place. It was VERY filling stuff. They even have lollipops to give out to customers as a little freebie "service". Finally back the hotel, we had our meal and got into another round of rest and recovery to prepare for the next day.