This afternoon I biked to a movie theater I had passed on the way into town -- in West Orange, near Edison's historic lab -- to catch a matinee of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."  On the way back I had to ride in rush-hour traffic, and I was very glad I hadn't had to do that yesterday when I was pulling the trailer!  I'll have to time my departure carefully.

4.94 mi

This morning Dave drove me into Brooklyn so I could see the Jewish wedding chapel that used to be the family hardware store.  After a bite of lunch we continued to Far Rockaway to see his childhood home, where my sister and I had visited our grandparents.  Aside from the house itself, I wouldn't have recognized most of Far Rockaway ... I can't say whether it's gotten better or worse, just different.

This evening he took me to his workplace and let me fly the two jet simulators he uses.  I got to land four times at JFK airport, once with no visibility and once with no instruments.  The newer simulator's graphics are so detailed that we could easily recognize the places we had been that morning!

Between the fancy avionics that tell you what to do, the autopilot that does what you tell it, and the fact that you rarely need to use the rudder pedals, I found the jets to be much easier to fly than the propeller plane I flew years ago in Bartlesville.  It's a good thing I didn't have to land that plane; I had enough trouble keeping it going in a straight line!

This morning I rode the bus to Manhattan and walked from the Port Authority bus terminal all the way through Central Park -- about 10 miles.  I didn't really know where I was going in the park; I just wanted to see what was there and get a feel for the place.  Last time I was there, breakdancing and leg warmers were all the rage!

I fell asleep on the bus back to New Jersey and got off at the wrong stop, so that I barely made it back to Dave's house by 3:00, when he'd said we had to leave for Poughkeepsie, NY.  There we attended his daughter Audrey's induction into Phi Theta Kappa, the national honor society for community-college students.  Audrey had a rather late start in life and has been attending a special school that's done wonders for her -- I'd say she's now more articulate than the average American her age, which was not the case last time I saw her.  Lately she's branched out to take classes at a mainstream community college, and she's only the second student from her school to qualify for PTK, so it was a big honor for her and everyone who's worked with her.  After a celebratory dinner we brought her home to Montclair for the weekend.

I spent the day today at the American Museum of Natural History, which I hadn't seen in some 15 years.  It still beats the pants off the Smithsonian.  Many of the exhibit halls have been renovated, most notably the Hall of Ocean Life, and the museum as a whole has been rearranged to better represent modern evolutionary theory.  The new Hall of Biodiversity is excellent; I particularly liked they way they juxtaposed descriptions of serious ecological problems with inspirational quotes... it sounds cheesy, but it really worked.

The new wing on the museum is the Rose Center for Earth and Space, containing an enormous sphere.  The upper part of the sphere is a state-of-the-art digital planetarium, where I watched a show about the case for extraterrestrial life.  You exit the planetarium on a catwalk whose displays use the sphere itself to teach about the scale of things: if the sphere were the sun, the Earth would be a basketball; if it were a hydrogen atom, a proton would be the size of a pinhead, etc.  Then there's another theater in the lower half of the sphere showing a short film about the Big Bang, and you exit onto another catwalk that chronicles the history of the universe, 1 foot = 50 million years.  At that scale, all of human history is the width of a hair at the end of the catwalk!

You may have noticed that my tour map has some blue dots described as "Great Story Sites." (Though you may not have, since the map loses some detail each time I edit it!)  This museum is the first such site I've made a point of visiting, and I must say it qualifies... between the story of the universe and the story of evolution and the stories of human cultures and agriculture, there are a lot of Great Stories being told there, and more than anyone can absorb in a day!

Today I took Ethan's car out to find bikeable roads out of the city.  The route I chose by studying the New Jersey Atlas will be fine, with a few modifications, but I had trouble finding the campground where I plan to stay.  It's not where Yahoo! says it is; it's several miles farther into the mountains, so depending on how I'm feeling, I may decide to stay in a hotel instead!

When I got back, after burning about $10 worth of fuel, I hopped on my bike and rode up Eagle Rock to the Essex County September 11 Memorial for some excellent views of the Manhattan skyline.

This morning I biked back into Paterson to see the Great Falls.  I met a man named Joe Shaw, a former trucker who had outfitted his bike like a semi, and he helped me find the falls.  I got lost again afterward and so saw more of Paterson than I'd intended!

I spent the afternoon posting a new roll of photos and looking for a Krishna statue for Leela.  Dave took me to dinner at a Thai restaurant.

12.9 mi

This morning I rode the bus back into Manhattan and went to the southern tip of downtown, Battery Park.  I walked from there to the World Financial Center, where there's an exhibit about the plans for the WTC site.  Ground Zero itself just looks like a construction site at present, but I got a photo of a nearby building that hasn't yet been repaired from the blast.  From there I walked through Greenwich Village to Washington Square Park, where the famous chess boards are.  Business was slow, because the park was being set up for NYU's graduation festivities.