More bites of the Big Apple

New York is, hands down, my favorite city in the world. I was born in Brooklyn, so I feel the city in my bones, but even without roots and history New York would top my great cities list. I can't get enough of it, and I'm overdue for a visit.

Having visited New York scores of times I've seen the obvious must-sees and done the obvious must-dos, many of them many times, each visit revealing new facets and aspects. (Your first visit to the Empire State Building might involve standing in the long line to take the elevator to the observation deck and taking in the mind-blowing view. Your second might be a slow perambulation and examination of the Art Deco lobby.)

I've also seen hundreds of more obscure, lesser known and less heralded spots around the five boroughs. The beauty of returning again and again to a place is once you've seen the Top Tens, the must-sees (I'll never call them cliched; if you haven't seen it, it's not cliche to you), then you're free, if you choose, to start digging through the rest of the place's rich layers.

There are things I do almost every time I go to New York: hang out in Central Park; people watch in Midtown; walk or run the Brooklyn Bridge; take in a Broadway show and the pulse of Times Square at night.

But I try to experience something new on each visit, too. Some still-to-dos include:

1. The High Line
2. An Off Broadway play
3. The Brooklyn Heights Promenade
4. Coney Island in summer
5. An afternoon in Harlem
6. Governor's Island
7. Walk the Williamsburg Bridge
8. The Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest house
9. The Frick Collection
10. The Tenement Museum

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Remembering where we were

On this 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks many of us will reflect on where we were as the horror of that day unfolded.

In this excerpt from my book, "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America," I share how my family took that terrible day and transformed it into an enriching odyssey:


Although my kids and I didn't climb into the van and drive off until nine months later, our 12,000-mile American road odyssey began on September 11, 2001.

Where I was and what I was doing when the planes ripped through New York are part of my life's fabric. I was outside painting the fence brown, telling my neighbor Donna that I had plenty of time now to do the job my 13-year-old son was supposed to have finished because I'd just been laid off. We groused about the economy's sorry state and mused over whether things could get any worse.

In the next instant, they did. The kitchen phone rang. It was my husband calling from the car to tell me one of the Twin Towers had been hit. Mike was on the road, making sales calls, and hadn't seen any pictures yet. He'd only heard the radio reports.

The paintbrush hardened outside in the sun, pieces of cut grass sticking up like spikes in the brown mess.

When Adam and Dana came home from school we gathered around the table on the deck and began, as a family, to sort through facts and feelings and fears. The kids' teachers had done a good job dispensing comfort and assurance before sending them home. By the time they got to us, we'd decided we had three things to communicate: they were safe and loved; America was strong; the world's people were good.

To our family, this last point was as important as the others, because our kids have been traveling the world since they were babies. Respect for the world's people is part of their upbringing. This is a gift, and we'd allow no senseless act, however brutal, nor any retaliatory distrust or intolerance, to steal it.

My mind's eye called up images: two Turkish teenagers kicking a soccer ball with a five-year-old Adam on the grounds of Topkapi Palace; Adam joining a group of Bolivian boys in tabletop foosball during recess at Copacabana's school, Lake Titicaca shining at the end of the street; the kids building sand castles with Javier and Daniel, two Belizean brothers who'd pass our hotel each day on their way to class; Dana setting off for a bird walk, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, with Mike and Masai chief Zapati. These experiences enrich life and must continue.

As the painful, numbing slowness of the weeks immediately following September 11 yielded to something approximating normalcy, I regained enough focus to give the future some thought. That future had us traveling again, but this time, we'd get to know our America.

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10 things I will never do on vacation

It's a phenomenon I think would make good fodder for some psychology student's doctoral thesis: why people on vacation do dangerous or scary things.

There's a whole travel industry niche out there that provides travelers with adrenaline-pumping, fear-inducing adventures. People pay big bucks and stand in long lines to do things that could make them panic, vomit, faint, crash or fall. And they take their kids.

Here are 10 terrifying tourist activities you'll never catch me doing. I will not:

1. Bungee jump

2. Ride, like these nuts at Iguacu Falls on the Brazil/Argentina border, in a rubber raft under giant, foaming walls of water. (If you assume I will never white water raft, either, you are correct.)


3. Rock climb

4. Stand on the clear platform that juts from the side of the skyscraper formerly known as Sears Tower
5. Stand on the clear platform that juts from the side of the Grand Canyon

6. Take a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon

7. Take a helicopter ride over Manhattan

8. Para-sail

9. Hang-glide

10. Take a cruise (Perhaps you've noted a pattern running through some of my won't-dos: fear of water, consequence of a near-drowning incident at Maine's Sebago Lake when I was 13. Cruising's out: I'd be the passenger wearing a life jacket 24/7.)

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Christo and crutches: A trip to the deck

I took a little trip today -- from the kitchen, where I've pretty much been living for the past month, to the deck. (For those keeping tabs on my progress getting my Egypt trip money refunded, Intrepid and Orbitz/Egypt Air have come through, as I reported a few posts ago, but Nationwide/TruTravel Claims has been less customer-friendly. Despite my having sent a claim package with everything needed to prove loss, they're making me jump through redundant paperwork hoops and really work to get what's owed me.)

It was nice to be outside. I thought of Christo as I looked up into our big deck umbrella, set against a cerulean sky and backlit by the sun, its light diffused by the orange-beige fabric.

I was a deckchair traveler -- two dozen crutch-hops from the kitchen had transported me to New York City in 2005 and a gorgeously crisp February day spent wandering Christo's joyful orange installation, The Gates.

Click here to read an old post, Christo redux: A little joy . You'll find some photos of happy, gargantuan drapes, set against a cerulean Central Park sky and backlit by the sun, its light diffused by the orange fabric.

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Outdoor art adventures

You don't have to go to a museum to find great art. There are marvelous outdoor pieces in cities and towns all over the world. (Think Calders just sitting there on the sidewalks of New York. There's one that looks like a big bunch of red lollipops downtown by City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge.)

Wherever you travel, keep your eyes open for interesting sculptures, murals and other outdoor installations - like this colorful piece near the castle walls in Tarragona, Spain.

If you live near Boston or are planning to visit, check out this story I wrote for a recent issue of Boston Parents Paper that tells you where to find some great al fresco art in Beantown.

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A tapeworm grows in Brooklyn

I have a story in a book that hit store shelves in October. Chicken Soup for the Soul: All in the Family promises to be a hot seller: it's already in a second printing. Fun book. (Get it at Amazon, and while you're there, throw Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America in your cart. If you don't love it I'll buy it back.)

My Chicken Soup story, "The Sauerkraut Cure" takes you to Grandma Fink's kitchen in 1930s Brooklyn:

A recent genealogical expedition into my dad’s childhood yielded a folk remedy brought by his grandmother to Brooklyn from her native Alsace. I’d asked my dad to spend a day sharing memories of growing up in New York in the 1930s and ‘40s, and he had tales to tell, the most colorful of which involved Grandma Fink, the tender-tough matriarch of the extended family that shared her six-unit Brooklyn apartment building.

The close quarters of the Lincoln Avenue tenement were, thought Grandma Fink, a breeding ground for germs, critters and other unpleasantness, so she maintained vigilant guard over her clan’s health, administering poultices, plasters, salves and syrups and occasionally calling Dr. Hantmann in for a 25-cent kitchen table consult (the patient laid on the table for examination). And, she did seasonal cleaning, not just of the house, but of her grandsons’ insides as well.

Grandma Fink counted tapeworms among the potential threats to her family’s well-being, and twice yearly she waged war on any that might have found their way into my father and his two older brothers. Her weapon? Sauerkraut.

“One day each spring and fall, Grandma Fink would call me, Henny and Eddie into the kitchen," recalled my dad. "On the stove was a huge pot of water in which cabbage had been cooking for hours, made into sauerkraut. We knew from the towels and blankets covering the pot that it wasn’t for consumption. It was to attract tapeworms.”

The boys took turns standing on a stool that Grandma Fink had pulled to the stove. She’d lift the heavy towels that covered the steaming pot and push the boys’ little heads into the stinky steam. "We," said my dad, "were told to inhale the sauerkraut aroma, which Grandma said would ward off colds but most importantly, lure out any tapeworms growing inside us.”

Grandma Fink knew that tapeworms loved sauerkraut, especially kraut as delicious as hers, made from an old family recipe, and that, to get some, the parasites would swim up through the intestines to the mouth and try to jump into the sauerkraut pot.

As the boys sniffed the pungent mash, Grandma stood close by, waiting to pull out any tapeworms that might emerge. “Grandma was ready to capture them,” said my dad, “and we thought she was quite brave, because she told us they could be thirty, even up to eighty feet long.”

As far as my dad knows, Grandma never did catch a tapeworm. “I cannot recall a single one ever coming out of us,” he chuckled. But Grandma never let her guard down, pulling out the pot and firing up the semi-annual sauerkraut boil year after year after year, releasing each grandson from the ritual only when he became a young man and moved, for work, marriage or the military, out of her Brooklyn tenement and into the wide world.

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The Lipstick Building: Shades of Bernie Madoff

I must have 50 pictures of this building.

This is the view we've snagged nearly every time we've stayed -- for free, with Mike's frequent guest points -- at the Lexington Avenue Marriott in New York City. I've shot this building at every time of day and night, in all kinds of light and weather conditions. I think it's a cool shape and color, worth multiple takes.

Like the rest of the world, I didn't realize what was going on on the 17th floor.

Towering over 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue on midtown Manhattan's east side, it's called the Lipstick Building. I always thought Mike made the name up, and thought him terribly clever to have done so, until Bernie Madoff became an unwelcome household name and reports revealed that, while Madoff ran his legal enterprises from the Lipstick Building's 18th and 19th floors, the 17th floor was ground zero for his massive evildoings.

Had I any idea of what I was really looking at I would have used my highest-powerered telephoto lens to take those 50 shots. Might've captured something the feds could use...

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College visits: Very educational

Dana's well into her college selection process, and in the past six months we've visited over a dozen schools. We learned early not to schedule more than one per day. If you try to tackle two (and trust me, more is physically and mentally impossible), around 2 PM the campus and commentary of the second start to get squishy and indistinguishable from the place you visited in the morning and you end up shortchanging yourselves and both institutions. Better to start fresh each day with a single target you can really focus on. With private higher ed ringing in at about 50 grand per annum, it's nice to be as certain as possible that you're sending both your kid and your money to the right place.

You learn interesting things on college visits. That Columbia has a swimming requirement, for example.

This news caused me and Dana, well-rounded athletes but not keen waterbugs, to exchange raised eyebrows. Maybe she was thinking, Whoa. This is Columbia. This is New York. I could be doing so many things with my time here besides doing laps. I was thinking, Whoa. This is Columbia. This is New York. My money could be doing so many things here besides paying for Dana to do laps.

Were there a great reason for withholding a student's nearly quarter-million-dollar degree until she or he demonstrates prowess in the pool I'd think, OK, Columbia's smarter than other colleges. But the closest attempt I could find at offering a good reason to mandate student-body-wide swimming skills (after confirming with snopes.com that no, it's not because the child of a wealthy Gilded Age benefactor drowned at college, and rejecting as probable cause our Columbia tour guide's quip that "Manhattan is an island") is the description on Columbia's website of its core curriculum, which includes passing the swimming test: "These requirements describe an education of exceptional depth and rigor. They constitute the essence of the liberal arts tradition as well as the intellectual signature of a Columbia education." If I were a Columbian, unless the deans let me use my Aqua Jogger, the depth of the pool and the rigor of a semester-long attempt to navigate 75 yards of it "without resting" would indeed be an exceptional education -- in terror.

But, lest this weird, wet anachronism scare anybody off from applying to Columbia, diving a little deeper into the school's website reveals that you don't really have to know how to swim to get your sheepskin: you just have to show up at the pool. The requirement's evidently been watered down to accommodate those who've never been and never will be marine mammals -- and, I suspect, their bill-paying parents, who expected their college kids to have intermittent struggles keeping heads above water, just not literally.

So, unlike the watertight requirement in effect in, say, 1913, when the New York Times ran a lengthy piece about a student who spent four years trying and failing to pass the swim test and was therefor denied his degree, the current requirement offers trickle-down options that allow, in the end, just getting your name ticked off on the swim class attendance sheet.

When you arrive at Columbia, you can take a swim test. If you pass, you're good to go, perhaps with a little fish-shaped lapel pin to wear around campus. If you fail, you must take a beginner swimming course. If, after taking the course, you still can't pass the test, "the requirement is waived." Nor will your failed, flailing, semester-long aquatic efforts damage your GPA: "Students who fulfill the attendance participation requirements for the course will pass the course." Other obligations satisfied, you will get your degree, presumably alongside your natatorially superior classmates and not at a separate graduation ceremony for non-swimmers.

A few weeks after we visited Columbia, while on a tour of another college, a prospective applicant asked the student guide, "Does this school have a swimming requirement?" When the guide announced loudly to the group, "No! You do not have to take a swimming test to graduate," I saw a half-dozen teenagers and their parents raise their eyebrows at each other in relief. The school moved up on Dana's list.



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Journey

Although my kids and I didn’t climb into the van and drive off until nine months later, our 12,000-mile American road odyssey began on September 11, 2001. Where I was and what I was doing when the planes ripped through New York are part of my life’s fabric. I was outside painting the fence brown, telling my neighbor Donna that I’d plenty of time now to do the job my 13-year-old son was supposed to have finished because I’d just been laid off. We groused about the economy’s sorry state and mused over whether things could get any worse.

In the next instant, they did. The kitchen phone rang. It was my husband calling from the car to tell me one of the twin towers had been hit. Mike was on the road, making sales calls, and hadn’t seen any pictures yet. He’d only heard the radio reports.The paintbrush hardened outside in the sun, pieces of cut grass sticking up like spikes in the brown mess.

When Adam and Dana came home from school, we gathered around the table on the deck, and began, as a family, to sort through facts and feelings and fears. The kids’ teachers had done a good job dispensing comfort and assurance before sending them home. By the time they got to us, we’d decided we had three things to communicate: they were safe and loved; America was strong; the world’s people were good.

To our family, this last point was as important as the others, because our kids have been traveling the world since they were babies. Respect for the world’s people is part of their upbringing. This is a gift, and we’d allow no senseless act, however brutal, nor any retaliatory distrust or intolerance, to steal it.

My mind’s eye called up images: two Turkish teenagers kicking a soccer ball with a 5-year-old Adam on the grounds of Topkapi Palace; Adam joining a group of Bolivian boys in tabletop foosball during recess at Copacabana’s school, Lake Titicaca shining at the end of the street; the kids building sand castles with Javier and Daniel, two Belizean brothers who’d pass our hotel each day on their way to class; Dana setting off for a bird walk, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, with Mike and Masai chief Zapati. These experiences enrich life and must continue.

As the painful, numbing slowness of the weeks immediately after September 11 yielded to something approximating normalcy, I regained enough focus to give the future some thought. That future had us traveling again, but this time, we’d get to know our America.

Introduction to Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. To purchase, see right sidebar.

LoriHein.com

Prague in color

Dana's home. She bought gifts in Prague.

Mike got a gorgeous ceramic beer stein, Adam got a black t-shirt with giant white letters reading, "MY SISTER WAS IN PRAGUE AND ONLY THING SHE BROUGHT ME IS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT," and I got this brilliant pen and ink drawing of the city's domes, roofs and signature powder towers.

Dana picked it because of the colors, and she knew exactly where I'd hang it: on the mustard-colored wall in the family room in a grouping of travel mementos with the same color scheme.

The Prague skyline has joined two beaded Masai wedding necklaces, a cobalt and yellow watercolor of the Brooklyn Bridge and Twin Towers lit by a full moon, and a flyer advertising a bullfight that I picked off a sidewalk in Guarda, Portgual and had framed.

A look at that wall takes me around the world in one quick, colorful eyeful.


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The Big Apple Shines at Holiday Time

Economic woes have forced some of Manhattan's retailers to scale back their Christmas store and window displays, but New York is still one of the loveliest and most exciting places to visit during the holidays.

Read my recent Fun Family Travel column for ideas on what to do and see in New York this time of year:

"New York for Families: The Big Apple Shines at Holiday Time"

Wishing you all -- all around the world -- joy and peace.


www.LoriHein.com

No Words

New York: Boy bands and late trains

Dana and I had a great time in Manhattan and did everything on our to-do list except run the Brooklyn Bridge.

RENT was terrific. We had fourth row orchestra seats, so Dana was able to see every detail of the actors' faces and the sparkle of their eyes, something I used to find a thrilling benefit to good theater seats. That was before I developed boomer eyesight. My particular strain makes everyone look like they're covered in a layer of Saran Wrap, so Dana got more out of our fourth row vantage point than I did.

We visited three colleges, NYU, Fordham and Columbia, and liked them all. I wish I were going to college. I'd pick NYU. Live in Greenwich Village for four years? Yeah, doable.

We, or rather Dana, shopped a lot. While she shopped, I girl-watched, and it was fascinating. Nearly as entertaining as RENT. Many girls, I concluded, use shopping as a stage. The clothes are interesting, but what's really important is to be seen by other girls. The most attractive of these soi-disant shoppers act as if they're ho-humming their bored, chicer-than-thou way through the racks when what they really came for is to parade their hotness in front of lesser babes. It's a grand, mean derby -- and a marvelous spectator sport. The truly hot can set all the eyeballs in a store on fire. No one says a word, but every girl and woman (and the smart boys who've finagled themselves part-time jobs there -- must mention that to my son), dart repeated, furtive glances in the babe's direction, sizing up everything from lip pout to butt tightness to pedicure in a nanosecond-long, tip-to-toe eye sweep. The oglers pretend they're not looking and the ogled pretends she doesn't know she's being looked at. Sociology students: spend an hour female-watching in a trendy, budget-priced midtown store like H&M, Strawberry or Forever 21, and you'll come away with ten ideas for your thesis.

We saw the outdoor art installation, New York City Waterfalls, and were unimpressed. You can see all four waterfalls from South Street Seaport, and I don't recommend standing in the hour-long Circle Line boat queue so you can pay $10 to be taken closer to the falls. Not worth it. Nor would I travel to New York specifically to see this installation. Nice, but Christo it ain't.

A boy band figured prominently in our stay. The Jonas Brothers, one of Disney's latest manufactured acts, gave a free concert in Bryant Park on Friday morning, and for three days before the boffo event, suburban moms and their teenage daughters camped on the sidewalks outside the park for a chance to get inside the park perimeter come concert morning. The city generously supplied porta-johns, but the campers supplied their own food and drink, blankets, pillows, portable DVD players, folding chairs, card games, board games and fan magazines full of pix of the three dreamy (OK, so Dana and her friends tell me one is considered not so dreamy) musical brothers. And the moms who were smart or omniscient came armed with tarps, umbrellas, dry clothes and pop-up tents, because it poured like heck on those thousands of people Thursday night. At 6:30 on Friday morning I watched from our 6th Avenue hotel window as the police began letting the campers into Bryant Park. The first in line had been living on the sidewalk since Tuesday. A few minutes before 8, when the concert was to kick off (the concert was hosted and broadcast live by Good Morning America, hence the weird start time), Dana grabbed a to-go coffee from our hotel breakfast room, walked across 6th to Bryant Park, and found a spot on the sidewalk at the park fence. She stood not more than a hundred yards from the stage and the gyrating Jonases, hearing every song clear as a bell, snapping photos and video, sipping hot coffee, and feeling slightly guilty at having as good a view and concert experience as the thousands who'd lived on the pavement for days.

Trip over, we made our reluctant way to Penn Station for the 7:30 PM Amtrak to Boston. It finally left at 10:30. Every train to Massachusetts, from 5 PM on, was delayed by two to three hours. Amtrak offered not one word of explanation, neither in the station nor once we were on the train. That frosts my bonnet. We passengers were very cool and took it in stride, but we deserved at least an acknowledgment of the delays that went beyond letters and numbers on the giant departures board that hangs from Penn's central hall. Amtrak said nothing. Not a word. Somebody needs a lesson in customer service. We got home at 3:30 in the morning.

But I couldn't sleep because of the Jonas Brothers songs that kept invading my head.

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New York City Waterfalls: Sucked in by the Brooklyn Bridge

Dana and I are off to New York soon to catch RENT before it departs Broadway in September. Since I'm not one to spend a nanosecond of my NYC time standing in one of those half-price, same-day TKTS lines, I buy online at Broadway.com and pray that the show will be worth the exorbitant price. After a dozen or so shows, I've been stung only once, by Mamma Mia. Sitting through that interminable inanity was beyond painful, a misery that even a giant box of Goobers couldn't relieve. (And now, God help us, there's a film version. Meryl Streep, what were you thinking?)

Our other plans for this trip -- Dana's first Amtrak journey -- include visiting a few colleges, running the Brooklyn Bridge, and taking in the outdoor art installation Waterfalls, by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, which runs through October 13, 2008. Eliasson has installed four massive, turbine-powered waterfalls at four locations in Manhattan, including one that cascades off the bottom half of one of the Brooklyn Bridge's two iconic, granite towers.

Waterfalls on the Brooklyn Bridge and elsewhere are a neat idea, but it seems that the artist and the rest of the folks responsible for installing giant, water-sucking turbines around the city failed to consider that members of the viewing public could -- indeed, did -- get sucked in by those turbines.

Shortly after the installation went live, two kayakers paddled up to the Brooklyn Bridge cascade for a closer look. The turbine vacuumed them up and thrashed them about in and under the East River. They were rescued, but they nearly died.

Dana and I will view the New York City Waterfalls from terra firma or a Circle Line boat cruise.

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Soldiers', Sailors', Marines', Coast Guard and Airmen's Club: Affordable NYC haven for military

I get a lot of press releases from PR firms representing clients who sell travel-related goods and services. The releases are supposed to entice me to write a newspaper or magazine article about the clients' cruise-resort-book-tour-hotel-luggage-gadget. I delete most of the releases, but every once in a while I get one with information worth passing along.

Here's one about the Soldiers', Sailors', Marines', Coast Guard and Airmen's Club (SSMAC) in New York City. It's a safe, supportive, inexpensive place to stay for members of the military. I've copied the release verbatim below:


"Ask Hazel Cathers, Executive Director of Soldiers', Sailors’, Marines, Coast Guard and Airmen’s Club (SSMAC), what her job is all about and why she does it, she will look you straight in the eye, and in a crisp British accent, tell you, “it’s all for the troops.”

In the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, members of the military (both active and veterans) have this place that they can call their own in New York City-and not “break the bank” by staying there. At SSMAC, they can relax among fellow veterans, and open up about the issues that they’re facing-including being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

You might meet a soldier, standing the outside in the middle of a summer heat wave, commenting on the cool weather (he might have just returned from Iraq.) Or you might meet a wounded warrior who is being befriended by SSMAC volunteers and being shown a night on the town.

Soldiers’, Sailors’, Marines’, Coast Guard and Airmen’s Club (http://www.ssmaclub.org/) is a unique American institution. Founded by General Pershing specifically for returning World War 1 veterans, SSMAC, a nonprofit club, is the only private organization in the United States to provide safe, reasonably-priced accommodations to those who serve or have served their country and their families. (SSMAC is not affiliated with the federal government and receives no grants or subsidies and is supported solely through tax-deductible individual donations.)

Recently, appointed to her new job, Hazel Cathers, who formerly served as USO of Metropolitan New York Program Director and Interim Executive Director, feels that it’s extremely important to consider the emotional needs of the troops when they’re way from home, as well as the creature comforts of a nice place to stay. She explains that when there was a draft, everyone knew someone in the service, whether it be a father, brother or a friend. With a volunteer military, even in a time of war such as now, that personal connection is sometimes more distant, making it harder for the public to understand the challenges faced by the troops.

Organizations such as SSMAC keep the needs of the military (and their families) uppermost on their agendas. As an example, SSMAC is very visible in the wounded warrior movement and has become a “home” to wounded warriors who participate in athletic events, such as the New York Marathon. It also recently hosted members of the TAPS program (Tragedy Assistance Program) for families of those killed in combat in Iraq.

Because of the reasonable rates that are charged (approximately $47 per night), military members on leave who come to the hub of New York City can afford to bring their families to SSMAC, thus not wasting valuable travelling time. While you’re more likely to hear HOORAH at SSMAC, you may also hear the laughter of children having a reunion with a parent.

We would be delighted to have you visit SSMAC so you can see first-hand what a tremendous service it offers to the troops and their families. Thank you for your consideration. "

I have a few trips to New York City planned, so maybe I'll stop in and see the club. Sounds like a great place.

Please pass this post along to any servicemen and women you know who might enjoy visiting the Big Apple.

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Get me out of here! Tourists trapped

At yoga the other day our instructor, Anne, complimented the class on having attained a level of limberness that let us execute crunches on balance balls without rolling off and crashing onto the studio's wood floor. We students patted ourselves on the backs (a few of us literally, as further demonstration of our increased flexibility).

Over in the corner, Kathy commented that our workouts had also improved her lung capacity. "I went along on a field trip to the Bunker Hill Monument and climbed all the way to the top without getting winded. I was so excited!" She compared that visit with a previous Bunker Hill foray that had left her gasping for air on the narrow staircase that leads to the monument's observation deck and panoramic view of Charlestown and Boston's harbor and skyline. "The staircase keeps winding and turning, and people are coming down while you're going up. And there are no windows."

"Like the Statue of Liberty," said Lucia, unfolding herself from a perfect cat stretch. "I climbed up the Statue of Liberty once and got claustrophobia. Real claustrophobia. I had a panic attack. I was perspiring. I started crying. My son was five, and he didn't know what was happening." A fellow sightseer came to Lucia's aid and guided her to an open air platform where she was able to regroup and steel herself for the trek down.

I felt pangs of sympathy hyperventilation as Lucia recounted her clammy excursion into Lady Liberty's innards. I rolled around on my balance ball and thought about some of the weird, uncomfortable places around the world that I'd stood in lines and paid money to enter. Small, close places I'd have been better off viewing from the outside. High, dizzying places I'd have been better off contemplating from the ground.

The world offers the tourist many places to have a panic attack. Among them:

* Chichen Itza -- I had no problem with the steep climb to the top of the Pyramid of Kukulkan at this remarkable Mayan city in Mexico's Yucatan -- I even sat, smiling, in Chac the Rain God's lap for a rest and photo op when I reached the summit. But when Mike and I ventured inside the chamber behind a staircase at the structure's base for a look at the priceless jaguar statue it held, I freaked out. I imagined the entire pyramid collapsing on my head and pinning me inside the airless, unlit tunnel. A gringo sacrifice to the Mayan gods. I never reached the jaguar -- Mike tells me it was breathtaking -- but before I turned to grope my way back to the exit, I saw two luminescent green balls floating eerily in mid-air at the end of the pitch black passageway: the jaguar's jade eyes.

* St. Paul's Cathedral -- What could be cooler than a climb up into St. Paul's dome, one of the highest in the world? Imagine the sparkling views of merry old London I'd get from up there. I started up the stone staircase, following two 90-pound Japanese girls in stiletto heels, thinking, Piece of cake! London is my oyster! Then the cakewalk turned from broad, stone steps surrounded by reassuringly thick walls to an exposed metal catwalk with near-vomit-inducing gaps between the steps. I couldn't close my eyes, because I'd surely trip and go hurtling over the thin wrought iron armrails and splat unceremoniously onto the stone floor of the nave, a mile below. But I couldn't look, either. A see-through catwalk suspended a hundred feet in the air? Are you kidding me? I need an air sickness bag! I turned around, slowly, and picked my way, squinting, which was a compromise between keeping my eyes open and shutting them tight in terror, to ground level. And way, way up there, the two Japanese girls I'd earlier mentally dismissed as powder-puffy lightweights, pressed onward into the dome, bravely planting their toes and forefeet onto the metal grates and lifting their heels to keep their spikes from getting caught in the gaps.

* Sears Tower -- My architecture cruise on the Chicago River was a highlight of my visit to Chitown. I sat on the boat's top deck with my head tilted back, soaking in the amazing march of magnificent towers that lined both sides of the curving river. When we passed alongside and under the breathtaking endlessness of the black-glass Sears Tower, I couldn't see its top. So, of course, after the boat docked I decided I had to see -- no, stand in -- the top. I walked to the Sears, bought a Skydeck ticket and waited for my group to be called to board the elevator. As we shot up through the shaft at a speed I thought would surely launch us through the roof and into Indiana, the attendant told us about the gargantuan rollers in the 1,353-foot tower's basement that allow it to sway with the prevailing Windy City wind, that literal wiggle room essential to keeping the Sears from breaking in half and crumbling into Lake Michigan. The elevator opened at the Skydeck, and as I made my way toward the windows that faced Lake Michigan, one or more of those Great Lakes-spawned prevailings pummeled the tower. Which, in response, rolled on its gargantuan ball bearings. I was 1,400 feet above the earth in a moving building. I never even looked out the window. I turned tail and took the next elevator to terra firma.

(In July 2007 construction began on Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire, an immensity that will dwarf the Sears. It will be a residential building. I assume it will have its own version of basement ball bearings that will enable the mega-skyscraper to roll with it and blow in the wind. Just the promo video on the Spire's website scares me to death. I can't imagine living in it. Or even going to a dinner party in it. Imagine the host announcing, "No worries, everyone. When the building quiets down and your wine's stopped sloshing up out of the glass, Jeeves will come around with refills.")

* Ming Tombs -- I should know by now that I do not have the fortitude to handle tourist attractions with the word "tomb" in their names. But when you've spent thousands of dollars and flown three-quarters of the way around the planet to get to a place, you sometimes tune out the voice of experience. In the name of adventure, into the tomb you plunge.

No doubt many Beijing Olympic-goers will take the day trip from the capital -- if only to escape the city's toxic smog for a few hours -- and head to the Ming Tombs, eternal resting place of 15th-century Chinese emperors. I enjoyed the clear air (Whoa! What's that? Blue sky?!) that surrounded the tombs' 40 hilly park-like acres and the 24 larger-than-life-sized animal sculptures

that line the Sacred Way leading to the crypt. When I got to the crypt itself, the fun was over.

I followed my guide and a herd of tourists down a ramp into a smotheringly horrific underground space. As I stared at the lineup of royal sarcophogi, the walls started closing in. The ceiling got lower and lower. My eyes rebelled at the strange, thick, gray-dark of the chamber. A fetid stink -- death rot mixed with a noxious-smelling air freshener -- snaked through my nasal passages and attacked my lungs. I told my guide I had to leave. His task was to keep his assigned foreigners in a group and keep his eye on them, so he was disinclined to let me go. "Few minute more. Few minute more." A few minutes more would have rendered me insane, so I apologized to the guide and fled, pushing up the ramp against a new incoming stream of mostly Chinese visitors. To be ebbing when everyone else was flowing defied the cosmic order, but people saw the panic in my eyes and let me pass.

I must not be the only one to have clawed my way, sheet-white and gasping, from the clutches of the Ming Tombs. One online guide to the crypts contains this caveat: "We feel it necessary to remind visitors with heart problems to consider carefully whether they should enter the underground chambers. The atmosphere and dull lighting can be a problem."

I'd add: "If you don't have heart problems when you arrive at the Ming Tombs, there's a better than even chance you'll have some when you leave."

www.LoriHein.com

New York: Everyman's architecture

I'm off to New York, my favorite place. On Sunday I'm running the MORE Marathon, a Central Park 26-miler just for chicks over 40.

I love this race. It's five and half loops around Central Park's interior, car-free roads, and there's so much to look at. (My post, "Tour de Central Park," has details.) I also like it because I usually look decent in the overall results. Amazing what happens to your percentile performance when you remove the 32-year-old wonderboys from the field and run only against old ladies...

In the past, the pre-race expos, where you pick up your race bib and shoe timing chip, have been at hotel ballrooms in midtown, not far from the Central Park start line.

This year, they're sending us downtown to a place called the Altman Building. When I saw that I got a bit worried. Banished from midtown. Did this mean this race is in trouble? Holding a race expo way down on West 18th Street? What's with that?

Turns out the Altman Building is a historical gem. It was built in 1896 as the carriage house for the B. Altman Department Store, before Mr. Altman built a flagship store in midtown. Refurbished in 1998 as an elegant convention and functions venue, the Altman Building brims with 19th-century architectural detail. (And is, I discovered, the site of an annual New Year's Eve bash you might want to check out if your plans ever bring you to Manhattan on that night. It's a pricey party but looks interesting.)

New York's architecture can keep you busy forever. I've probably been to the city 40 times and always find something new to investigate and enjoy. For a marvelous guide to the treasures you pass on nearly every city street, pick up a copy of the AIA Guide to New York City, first published in 1967 by the Architectural Institute of America and a layman-friendly, block-by-block description of the history and detail of thousands of buildings.

I love New York's buildings --storied, iconic structures like the Empire State, Chrysler and Flatiron; soaring, new towers that are ushering in an age of green, eco-friendly construction; smaller, centuries-old brick, wooden and cast iron buildings that dot the city.

But I love, too, the prosaic, pedestrian things that sit atop and decorate the sides of New York's buildings. There is remarkable beauty in fire escapes and water towers.

www.LoriHein.com

Feelin' groovy on the 59th Street Bridge?

I'm off to New York tomorrow for Sunday's marathon and won't be blogging while I'm gone. I'm leaving the laptop at home and won't even be checking my spam, er, email.

Other than a walk to the race expo at the Javits Center to pick up my number and a brief Saturday morning visit to Central Park to watch America's best male distance runners compete in the Men's Olympic Marathon Trials for a berth to Beijing, I'll be hunkered down in my (free) Marriott room, resting my legs and downing water, chickpeas, canned tuna and whole wheat penne: I avoid race-sponsored pasta dinners. Not only do they keep me up too late on marathon eve, I find them crowded and stressful, and the pasta is invariably the bright yellow, un-whole grain variety. While I might risk a 10K on that stuff, I'm unwilling to stake a 26-miler on it. I bring my own high quality, pleasingly brown, slow-release pasta, cooked and stored in a cooler, and if I can't find a microwave at the hotel, I warm it with hot water run through the in-room coffee maker (filter basket removed, or you get pastaccino...). Anal, yes, but it works for me.

This will certainly be my slowest marathon. I'll be popping Extra-strength Tylenol along the route to help keep my sciatica, bulging back disk and tad-too-tight left hamstring from screaming too loudly and pulling me up short. Lucklily, I have a PR (personal record) that I'm happy to let stand for the rest of my life, so I don't have to worry about the clock. I just want to show up at the start, show up at the finish, and have a decent time in between. My outing won't be fast and it won't be pretty, but it'll be thrilling. Boston may be the marathoner's holy grail, but to my mind, New York delivers, mile for mile, much more excitement, emotion and humanity.

I've got some Simon and Garfunkel in my iPod, and I've rigged my race playlist so their 59th Street Bridge Song will play, hopefully, somewhere between Miles 15 and 16, the two ends, give or take, of the Queensboro Bridge . I doubt I'll be feelin' groovy at that point -- I will likely have left my last gasps of grooviness on the pavement about a mile or so back -- but I do know I'll be happy to see the Queensboro.

Crossing the Queensboro is a rush. As you ogle the full-in-your-face skyline views, a cheering, ten-deep crowd welcomes you to 59th Street. You've conquered Staten Island, Brooklyn and a dreary, industrial section of Queens, and you've made it to Manhattan. You still have two short hops over the Harlem River to nail a brief half-rectangular jog through the Bronx before re-entering Manhattan, but once your feet leave the Queensboro and hit Manhattan pavement for the first time, visions of the Central Park finish start dancing through your head.

As I won't be posting until I get home, here are links to a few archived stories that I hope you'll enjoy:


Bodie's ghosts

Boo from Bolivia: Witches' Street

Belize: A little capsaicin with our vacation

The Siq: The most wondrous walk in the world

"In Argentina, we descend from ships..."


LoriHein.com

Tribute

Each year on this date I post this essay, published in 2001:

United We Ran

I know where hope lives. I know where strength, endurance, passion and pride live. They live in New York City. On Nov. 4, I ran through 26 miles of these affirmations of our humanity.

This New York City Marathon was not about athletes turning in impressive times. It was only about going the distance — the distance from profound sadness and loss to a point where collective human goodness and hope carry us toward a finish line we still can’t see. In a city pierced through its core by hate and pain, hope is alive and well. There is no doubt it will triumph.

Thirty thousand runners came to New York to fuel that hope. We came from all over the globe to tell New York it doesn’t stand alone. Runners from Kansas and Denmark and Japan and Algeria and California and Scotland and Venezuela came to show the people of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island and New Jersey and Staten Island and Manhattan and Queens and Yonkers and White Plains and southern Connecticut that their pain is shared. When pain is shared, it is eased.

In turn, the two million spectators who lined the 26.2 mile five-borough route fueled the runners with something far more nourishing to a spent body and mind than any energy drink or quick-acting carbohydrate. They carried us through the neighborhoods, up the hills, over the bridges, past the buildings, down the avenues, around the corners and into Central Park with their humanity. To say we connected is to understate the pure human goodness that permeated every inch of every borough. When we slapped palms with kids in Brooklyn and exchanged high-fives with teenagers in the Bronx and looked into the eyes of young mothers in Queens and smiled at old men on kitchen chairs waving flags and raised defiantly clenched fists to the firefighters watching from their engines and station houses, we said, together and loudly with no words, "We cannot be beaten. We will overcome. We are united. "

Go to New York if you can. You will hear occasional sirens and see a few hazmat trucks roaring down the street. You will likely make the unspeakably painful pilgrimage to ground zero to try and take in the enormity of the loss and grief. You won’t be able to and you will walk away numb. You will see billboards and walls with the faces of young people gone forever. You will see the tired eyes of cops operating on adrenaline and resolve. You will see fire stations wreathed in purple bunting and covered with drawings from school kids in Lubbock, Texas and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

But keep walking and looking and you will find hope. You will check into your hotel and be given both a key and a smile that thanks you for coming. You will ask an elevator attendant how he’s doing and he’ll thank you for asking. You will eat dinner in a Turkish restaurant with an American flag painted on its window. You will see the Christmas lights strung across Mulberry Street in Little Italy, lighting the hopeful faces of waiters beckoning you to try their pasta tonight. You will see the pulsing neon of Times Square and the lacy spires of St. Patrick’s and the holiday window dressers already at work on Fifth Avenue. You will look from the Chrysler Building’s gleaming art deco cap to the Empire State Building, doing justice to its role as New York’s tallest building by beaming its red, white and blue floodlit top like a beacon to the city and the world.

I know where hope lives. It lives in New York City. And it lives in all of us.

LoriHein.com

New York redux: Sleep cheap

With Rat's help, I fixed my blog problem (see last post, below).

The fix required deletion of my recent post on inexpensive (everything's relative) New York City hotels, as that post contained the errant HTML code that threw the blog out of whack.

I've reposted the story here -- hopefully sans stinky code:

Thanks to Mike's Marriott reward points, when I go to New York for the marathon in November I'll be staying free for three nights at a midtown Marriott. The value of my room on race weekend is $420 per night before tax, so I'm getting about $1,500 worth of free Manhattan hotel space.

The handbook for runners lists some half dozen high-end hotels -- usual suspects like Marriotts and Sheratons. And thousands of runners will cough up those establishments' $400+ per night in order to run New York.

Seems crazy to me. Were I sleeping in New York on my own dime I'd consider cheaper alternatives. Here are a few:

Radio City Apartments, West 49th Street -- the heart of midtown, near Radio City Music Hall. Not fancy, just functional. All units have a kitchenette, and it looks, from the pix on the hotel's website, that the bedspreads now match not only the curtains but each other, an upgrade since the last time I was there (it was Eastertime -- the kids were amazed when they woke up and found that "the Easter Bunny knew we were in New York and brought our baskets here!"). Studios start at $175 per night.

Beacon Hotel, 2130 Broadway near West 75th Street -- My friend, Carol, stays here whenever she's in New York. The Beacon's on the Upper West Side, close to Central Park, Lincoln Center and the American Museum of Natural History. Like Radio City, units have kitchenettes, and singles start at $220.

Seafarers and International House, Lower East Side -- This church-supported refuge provides lodging and services for seamen and ship crews docked in New York, but it also offers clean, simple accomodations to landlubbing tourists and travelers. Singles with shared bath start at $80.

The Pod Hotel, East 51st Street -- New. Offers sleek, small, stylish rooms from $139. Rooms measure only 10 x 12 feet, but you get an LCD TV, an iPod dock and free WiFi access.

LoriHein.com