Monday, June 13, 2011

The seven hour city walk

"If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes," said Robert Redford. And if you stay in Malibu too long you become a Bentley, or a Chrysler cruiser, depending which end of the '27 miles of scenic beauty' you live. (We were at the Cruiser end, fyi).

So - in case you hadn't noticed, dear reader - I'm just loving walking everywhere in New York.

Fortunately for me, TLOML is too. He's a big believer in the digestive benefits of stretching your legs after eating or drinking too much, which is license to drink and eat too much of course. And going for a good city yomp has become a nice alternative to strolling along the beach.

Since that's how we roll now, a couple of weekends ago we struck out with our legs as our vehicles.

We walked along the Hudson to Battery Park City, about 3 miles away at the bottom of Manhattan. There we marvelled at the many buggies and toddler playgrounds and decided we knew exactly the kind of people who lived there (and admitted we may be such people one day).


We headed East, across the bottom of Tribeca. On the edge of the Financial District we rewarded ourselves for our 60 minute walk with a coffee at Kaffe 1668, a place which takes itself and its coffee extremely seriously in a totally unconvincingly irreverent way.


Then on to the oldest bit of New York, where furs were traded and fortunes made and lost. There I pointed out some old churches to TLOML, who feigned faint interest. We walked along Wall Street, and I took a lot of photos, although I wasn't really sure why. Probably the same reasons tourists take pictures at Piccadilly Circus, even thought it's basically just an overcrowded intersection with London's worst branch of Boots.


Our legs were aching now, but we tackled the length of Pearl Street which took us into the heart of Chinatown. We schlepped along East Broadway, TLOML drooling at the poultry hanging up in the windows while I thought of Eraserhead.





Our stomachs were starting to growl. So we headed up the Lower East Side to St Mark's Place and a great little bar for a Polish beer, followed by some well deserved yakitori. After we'd eaten, we placed three additional orders. A record.

Not sure we had walked enough, we then walked home past the Flat Iron and along 23rd Street.


This allowed us to go via Eataly for a gelato. Whereupon we agreed for the fourth time that we don't really like Eataly. Too busy.

By the time we got back to Rabbit Hutch Towers we'd covered about 7 miles in 7 hours. On reflection we thought that sounded like a pretty lame pace. But oh! Our feet did ache!



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