My journey began in the US, and it would end in the US; planned trans-Atlantic family trips had served as the start and end points of the trip from its inception. After ten months of tropics, showering out of buckets and remote beaches, the logical next step was to visit perhaps the citiest city in all the world.

New York ¶

After a several-hour wait in New York JFK, the others finally emerged from the arrivals gate. We briefly caught up, I spent a ludicrous four dollars on a bottle of water and we went off in search of our rental car. Then, unfortunately for him, Dad had to drive across Manhattan in the evening with a satnav system that was certainly not up to the street density. We were introduced to New Yorker asshole culture by the security guard on the way out of the parking lot, and then repeatedly from the other drivers on the road.

Weehawken ¶

Eventually, we arrived at our Airbnb rental across the Hudson in Weehawken, and the view was pretty incredible:

Megan Goldsworthy

The apartment itself was lovely, though I was surprised to find that the Central American toilet bins had followed me to the overdeveloped centre of the modern world; my long-anticipated flushing of roll after roll of paper would have to wait. My brother and I set off for some food, and we all had an early night.

New York City ¶

We had two days in the City itself, and Mum had assembled a packed itinerary. We caught the bus in and made a beeline for the High Line, a former elevated rail track since converted into a walkable park. It was a little surreal but gave us a good meandering route through the city without having to stop every couple blocks to wait for traffic.

Sonia Goldsworthy

We stopped off at the Chelsea Market for lunch, and then continued on the High Line to Little Island, a man-made island park on the Hudson. The architecture and landscaping were certainly impressive, although we weren’t there in time for any live performances.

Megan Goldsworthy

After some effort (and the help of an uncharacteristically friendly bus driver) we finally found our way down to the September 11 Memorial: the pools were very impressive, and the use of the negative space to build the memorial was an inspired architectural choice.

Megan Goldsworthy

We stopped off in The Battery for a drink before heading to the ferry terminal to catch a boat over to Staten Island and back, catching a distant glimpse of the Statue of Liberty whilst doing so. Paying through the nose for a visit to Ellis Island and up into the statue itself seemed to rather defeat the point, similar to how much nicer the NYC skyline looks from outside of the city. We also got a round of beers, which we had to drink out of brown paper bags in a way that made the whole experience feel a hundred times shiftier that it was.

Sonia Goldsworthy

Megan Goldsworthy

We hopped back on the Metro and made our way up to Times Square. There were some parts blocked off for construction, and I’m not completely certain that we actually found the Square itself, but we got close enough to get suitably blasted by advertising:

Megan Goldsworthy

For our second day in the City, we visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to escape the heat. Despite having really enjoyed the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, I found the MoMA solidly underwhelming. A big part of this was because they had devoted a lot of space to a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition, and I’ve maintained ever since having to study her at secondary school that O’Keeffe is a profoundly uninteresting artist; rather annoyingly, we had just missed out on a far more interesting-sounding exhibition about interactive design. That said, after walking around for a few hours, I only found a few pieces that I found worth taking pictures of:

Painting by Toyen

Painting by Andrew Wyeth

Painting by Richard Oelze

We had an unexpectedly massive lunch at Astro Restaurant and made our way to Central Park to lay on rocks in the sun like a bunch of lizards. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans and we rushed back to the bus station as the rain poured down (stopping only for a round of gelato at Amorino).

And with that, we were done with NYC. Whilst I still don’t think the big city life is for me, it was nice to be in a city that has at least something distinctive about it after so many interchangeable Central American ones. I had also been expecting the sheer size and intensity of the place to be a bit overwhelming after so long spent in rural, remote areas, but I found that the skyscrapers were surprisingly unintimidating from within. A big part, I suppose, is that you can never really see more than one block in any direction, so you end up taking the city chunk by chunk. Unfortunately, you often have to stop between chunks for traffic, and even over two days the stop-start nature of traversing the city was grating.

New Jersey ¶

After New York, we drove south to New Jersey (as Woke Up This Morning played on a loop in my head).

Sea Isle City ¶

We spent several days at my aunt’s beach house in Sea Isle City, towards the southern end of the Jersey Shore. We were joined by my grandparents, various cousins, my uncle and his partner for a fairly packed family reunion. The latter two had been following along with my travels on the tracker, though my uncle said I had lost him somewhere in Mexico.

Photo by the author

I’ve been quite spoiled for beaches recently and this one was busier than I like, so I only spent the one day there; the view from the house balcony was nice enough though. One day we went on a cycle ride to the end of the island and back and we all had a big night at The Point, but otherwise the time was spent mostly relaxing.

Flemington ¶

Photo by the author

Lastly, we headed back up north to Flemington to stay at my aunt’s. We explored the garden a bit and made use of the pool, and a couple of Mum’s old friends came over to see us, but otherwise it was a low-intensity end to the trip; probably just what I needed.