Halloween in New York

Halloween is a big event in the eastern USA and we have been seeing signs of it as we moved through Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. We expect it to be a big event in the big elephant and we are not disappointed. We start the day out with Robert in the Upper East Village looking for the missing parts of his costume as a British Bobbie.

















Outside the store we see how they treat jaywalkers in New Jersey.

Robert has a business meeting so after he leaves we walk to the downtown and Battery Park. It is too late in the day to get access to the Statue of Liberty so we save some money and head back to Williamsburg. There is a big Halloween parade in Manhattan but we can’t find anyone who knows its actual location. All we find is a graveyard with pumpkins. So Roger opts for the kids’ parade on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg.

In the end it is humans that matter more than buildings and the kids are an especially important part of humanity. So here they are on Halloween.

































The following day we head for Roger’s hometown to drop the van and for a quick visit with his brother Ian and sister-in-law Lyn. By the time we get back to Galapagos and Robert’s loft he’ll be in Berlin so we bid him au revoir and hit the freeways early to avoid traffic since we have to go in to Manhattan to get through the Holland Tunnel and out the other side. Why can New York have tunnels lined with white tiles when Beautiful BC has the grungy Deas Tunnel? Something’s wrong with this picture.

With only one miscue when the MapQuest instructions don’t match what we see (in Newark where the local police put us quickly back on the right track) we cross the Niagara River at Queenstown, site of one of the important battles of the War of 1812, fought in North America between the British, some Canadian troops and the USA. But in reality this was a sideshow to the more important conflict between Napoleon and Britain and her allies culminating in the Battle of Waterloo, Marie-Claire's hometown.