To Anyse: Vacation & art shows

[Guest guest]

Glad to see you gof your Vegas vacation, and that you're now getting some

success with

the pain control. I haven't seen the board posts for about a month due to

vacation trip &

subsequent catch-up. Lobby computers for guest use seem to be missing in New

York

state, so I'm way behind on PAI, email, and a big stack of snail mail.

Like you, I decided to chance a vacation trip, feeling so much better after my

July surgery,

& I had better luck than you--no serious bad effects. I included some art

appreciation

itinerary too though some didn't work out. The NY Metropolitan Art Museum

looked to be

a short hike across Central Park after a morning visit to the Natural History

Museum, but

we spent too much time at the latter, enthralled with the multiple galleries of

prehistoric

creatures. My wife and I did get to a lot of interesting historic places

including lin &

Eleanor Roosevelt's home & the Vanderbilt mansion at Hyde Park, Washington

Irving's

home at Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, homes of B. and Eastman

(Kodak) at Rochester, home of Morse at Poughkeepsie (famous as a portrait

artist

before he invented the telegraph), home at Auburn of Harriet Tubman, and home of

her

friend & supporter Seward who was Lincoln's Sec of State and

instrumental in the

purchase of Alaska. The tour of the United Nations skipped my favorite art

there, the

Chagall window--had to search it out ourselves.

While in Poughkeepsie I realized Vassar College is there, and remembered I'd

seen on a

website they were supposed to have an extensive collection of

Coatsworth's

works and manuscripts. She wrote books that were some of my favorites as a

child,

especially one of the Alice & Jerry series of readers. They did have many of

her original

editions. The manuscript collection was very small, but it was interesting to

look at a

book draft and sense her thought processes as she inked out and wrote in words &

phrases. No word processors in those days.

We did the two-day hop-on-hop-off bus tour while in NYC. Touristy, but you do

get lots

of trivia pointed out that we'd otherwise miss, like Trump's apartment,

the

driveway where Lennon was shot, the restaurant that inspired the

" soup-nazi "

episode of " Seinfeld " , and the nest of " Pale Male " the hawk who thrills New York

naturalists

every year by raising young on a window ledge on Fifth Ave. I'll never complain

again

about the lines at DMV or on weekends at Disneyland after spending 2 hours in a

weekday

queue for the Empire State Bldg observation deck elevator.

Also visited Ground Zero of course, Niagara Falls, Watkins Glen, the Finger

Lakes country

(but no wineries), Fort Ticonderoga, Baseball Hall of Fame at stown, West

Point, Erie

Canal, the Corning Glass Co. museum & lots more. Saddist thing of museums in

many NY

cities was their exhibits about their local industries that once manufactured

world-famous

products, now all gone, remembered only as museum exhibits. At Oneida's

" long-house " ,

residence of the utopian free-love sect that started making Community

silverplate in

1848, I asked what happened to their factories. The commune only lasted 30

years and

the business became a corporation, but the last Oneidaware factory closed only a

few

years ago. All their silverplate and dinnerware now made in China, Thailand,

etc.

As you can tell, we " flew low " through New York state, and are most grateful for

our health

holding up.

Glad to see you're hanging in there and back giving help to others.

Kurt (CA)