This post isn’t going to contain a lot of anything other than the photos of New York’s streets as we made our way back from getting off the Staten Island Ferry to where our hotel was. We chose a different, more direct route to facilitate this from our outgoing trek since our walk thus far had taken us longer than we’d expected thanks to failing to grasp the scale on the map. For the most part we simply followed Broadway. Fewer points of interest, therefore, so fewer chances for me to waffle on about inconsequential crap. But I’ll try anyway, because I’m me.

We could see we weren’t too far from Wall Street and it was roughly in the direction we needed to walk anyway so very soon we happened upon the Charging Bull sculpture. Our visit in November 2011 took place just a month after the Occupy Wall Street protests had occurred so there were still barriers up around the artwork as it had been a target for vandalism thanks to its association with the capitalism that everyone was somewhat miffed about back then. Thanks goodness we’ve all learnt to worship capitalism again now, though, eh?

The barriers meant we couldn’t rub the bull’s testicles, and for that we’re glad. It’s supposed to bring luck but the only luck it can possibly bring you is the luck that you don’t catch anything off whatever the person before you had and left on the bronze surface.

Charging Bull was sculpted by Arturo di Modica, originally illegally dumped on Wall Street, then later moved to its home at Bowling Green, not too far away.

Wall Street itself was not interesting. I know, I’m as surprised as you that they didn’t think to make the financial hub of New York more fun for kids. However, outside Federal Hall, the place where George Washington was sworn in as President in 1789 and in which the Bill of Rights was written, we watched a man climb on top of the plinth of the statue of Washington to pose for a photo for his girlfriend or wife. Not going to lie, but we were disappointed that cops didn’t start shouting at him in thick New Yoik accents to get his ass down off there or something.

Something we didn’t realise, or would likely have cared about at the time, to be fair, is that Federal Hall is next to Trump Tower. Just think: a carelessly discarded, lit bomb from the Acme Corporation back then and we could possibly have changed the course of history and stopped the narcissistic orange fascist from rising to the dizzying heights of most-laughed-at nutball.

Looking west(ish) from Wall Street presented the incongruous view of Trinity Church in the gap between two skyscrapers. When this church – the third such church with this name built on this location – was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century it was, until 1869, the tallest building in the United States.

One of the good things about New York’s streets from the perspective of a street photographer is that you often need to stop and wait for traffic lights to let you cross. You end up with all sorts of people just across the road from you, stationary, and sometimes very interesting photographically. Not these people, mind, and I wouldn’t call myself a street photographer anyway, but you can expect to see random snaps of people waiting to cross streets throughout this New York photowalk.

The building with the attractive façade below is the Manhattan Municipal Building built between 1909 and 1914 in a style best described as all its own, but borrowing from European Renaissance. The gilded copper statue on the building’s top is called Civic Fame and is 7.6 metres high, making it the second tallest statue in Manhattan if including the Statue of Liberty, and built in a similar style too.

How many jeans do you want? Unlimited, you say? Seems a bit greedy but let’s see. Well, okay then, looks like New York’s the place for you.

I really liked how much grimy life there was to see in New York. The condition of the shop in the photo below with its tattered awnings, the scrawl of graffiti, and the questionably genuine products on sale is so attractive in a perverse way. We came away from this visit to New York with a feeling that yes, we could live here. In the city, that is, not the shop.

Leghead is a street artist from New York, although I don’t know if the girl and bunny image is his, or just the tagging, or both. Everyone’s got a message to broadcast, though, whether that you love the bunny image, or you want China out of Tibet, or you want people to know that your reasonable demand to tax the rich is offset by your conspiracy theories.

As someone who walks around with a dSLR I do like looking out for other invested camera owners, perhaps trying to catch their eyes so we can nod, work out who’s got the most expensive body and lens arrangement in order that we know our social standing amongst one another, and bask in that fellowship that we’re both living on the edge, risking a right proper mugging one of these days. This photographer was busy taking pictures of a model, though, so that never happened. I did search online without success after this trip to America to see if I could see the photo published anywhere on social media but it was a rather remote hope in the first place.

Time to dust off your detective skills. I want you see if you can identify the clues that will lead you to work out which building along this street is the McDonald’s restaurant. No cheating by trying to find the place on Google Maps, now.

The Strand Bookstore in 1996 was the largest used bookstore in the world and has also featured in a number of TV shows and movies, although I imagine half the buildings in Manhattan have featured in a TV show or movie at some point.

The picture of the two guys on the corner of this New York street below was probably my favourite capture of the day. Sometimes you just look at a shot and think “Oh yeah, I can get all obnoxiously pretentious about this lucky snap!”

The artist here is showing how people in modern society are in conflict and are not just mirrors to others but complete inversions. The white guy in the black top; the black guy in the white top. They’re not facing each other. See how one is looking to leave while the other remains, but notice the body language too. Apprehension and fear of the path ahead from one, but a relaxed state and acceptance from his negative. And above the pair of them are society’s signs: the white man can walk, but look again at which way the arrow is pointing and ask yourself what that says.

There’s one more post to complete this Manhattan Photowalk series and that will be the small amount of wandering around in the vicinity of our hotel in New York that we took on the Monday morning while waiting for the bus to take us back to Washington D.C. Expect rain. Expect some moaning about the false advertising present in the description “The city that never sleeps.”

With this post being a snapshot in time of our visit to America’s most populous city late in 2011 there will be things in this post that no longer exist or that look significantly different. You’ll see, for instance, that we visited while the One World building was still under construction. If you want to see photos of it being constructed then you’re in luck, but if you’re using this post to fuel your construction sites fetish and rush off to New York in anticipation of some hot, hot, incomplete building-work action then you are in for one hell of a disappointment. All travel-related content on the web is like this, of course, and that’s why I don’t find those Top 10 Things To See In New York-style articles terribly useful or engaging, since who knows when someone’s going to be reading it and what will still be around or have changed beyond recognition or improved or been bumped from that list? None of that is to say that this post will be useful or engaging, either. In fact, I can almost promise it won’t be.

A tiny bit of background, then, before the post commences. These photos were taken in late November, 2011. We were in America to see and stay with my wife’s sister who lived in Virginia, not far outside Washington, D.C. at that time. While we were there, and hitherto unplanned, we decided to book a bus from the nation’s capital to New York along with a hotel stay there for two nights so that we could spend a day looking around. We travelled up on a Saturday afternoon and returned on the Monday morning which gave us a Sunday for exploration. With no real preparation and limited time we opted to skip looking for the sorts of things we might otherwise be interested in – museums, obvious tourist traps, etc. – and just get a feel for whether we’d like to come back and see New York in depth at some future date. Our Sunday in New York would be spent on foot.

This is the first of three posts covering our New York photowalk, taking in the first half of the Sunday’s pedestrian activities. In part two I’ll cover the second part of the day, while the final part concludes with some Monday morning meandering ahead of our scheduled return to D.C. As always, I’ll point out anything historically or architecturally interesting (to me) or anything we saw that was memorable for some other reason, but you can consider these mostly to be just posts full of photos of New York City if you like.

Our hotel was just off Fifth Avenue so we started there and headed onto West 33rd Street because that’s where the Empire State Building was. We decided not to go inside and up to the viewing platform but to simply admire the Art Deco lines of its architecture from street level. One interesting thing about the design – again, to me; you might find this quite the opposite – is that the tapered, stepped, symmetrical look of the Empire State Building, which you look at and instantly say “Yes, Art Deco, obviously” while stroking an imaginary beard on your all-too-real chin (apologies if you’re chinless), a classic design you’ll find around the world from buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, actually owes its origins to New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution code.

You aren’t going to mention city zoning codes, are you?

Yes, yes I am.

With new building techniques and bigger buildings appearing, a resolution was passed in New York early in the twentieth century to prevent large blocks appearing that would prevent sunlight and air reaching street level. The solution for architects was to implement setbacks in the design to change the angle from the top of the building to the middle of the street. On the Fifth Avenue side, a building with the base area that the Empire State Building held would have been limited to just twelve stories so as not to block out all daylight, but by stepping in from the base, taller central tower areas were possible. Much taller. The Empire State Building owes its design to the zoning regulations, and its height and global fame took that design and integrated it back into other skyscrapers constructed during the Art Deco period, even where no such rules restricted buildings in the same way.

In case you’re wondering about modern building designs then, yeah, they changed that resolution. Hey, you can’t give consideration to people getting light and air forever, you know.

We pretty much just continued heading westwards from there, shifting one street up to West 34th Street at some point. Occasional photos of buildings, shops, people, and yellow taxi cabs were taken because we were tourists, after all, and that’s what tourists do.

The New Yorker Hotel below, as you can probably guess, was a contemporary of the Empire State Building, completed in 1929, with similar setbacks in the design. At the time, and for some time after, this was the largest hotel in New York City, boasting two and half thousand rooms, each with a radio!

At Ninth Avenue we turned southwards in order to cut out what looked like some less-interesting buildings ahead. We would eventually come out on the western side of Manhattan by the Hudson River around 16th Street.

The Marine & Aviation Pier 57 building that caught my eye was built and opened in the early 1950s. It was a replacement for a wooden pier on the same location that had burned down in the decade prior and served mainly for cargo shipping purposes, although its use as a temporary detention centre in the wake of protests at the Republican National Convention in 2004 earned it a nickname of Guantanamo on the Hudson.

We were not surprised to discover that the Hudson wasn’t the cleanest-looking stretch of water. You don’t think of New York or even New Jersey – the city and state visible across the water – and think “Yeah, those are clean places”, and while that’s a terrible generalisation that is likely only mostly true, and while the water colour may have had more to do with backwash, silt, and the general geology than the huge amount of industrialisation and high numbers of piers along this shoreline serving cargo, fishing, and pleasure vessels, there’s no getting away from the fact that you probably wouldn’t want to swim here.

The big question is: did we see Vladimir Putin walking the streets of New York City?

The big answer is: maybe. He is fond of baring his torso.

Unless you’ve got terrible short-term memory or you simply skipped the paragraphs at the top because words are hard and pictures are easy, then you might remember that this walk took place in November. In fact, it was just a couple of days before December, but to allay any concerns that we’d found a complete weirdo to wander behind – I mean, it’s still a distinct possibility what with this being New York City – I can confirm that it was surprisingly warm. Even though we saw plenty of people in coats throughout this day, we wore nothing more on top than t-shirts.

We reached the site of the construction of the One World Trade Centre. At the time of writing this, it is the tallest building in the United States of America, but at the time of our visit it wasn’t quite finished. The architectural firm responsible for the design were also responsible for the design of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It was, of course, pretty sobering to stand there and know the history of the spot, to imagine the former buildings at that location crumbling following the attacks of a decade earlier.

We took this opportunity in our New York photowalk to stop for a drink and a bite to eat. This took place in Brookfield Place and my overwhelming memory of this was thinking “I’ll get a sandwich with mustard on it even though I’m pretty sure I don’t like mustard but I’m in New York City and I think they like mustard and oh no what have I done my nose my nose oh the mustard fumes are burning all the hairs in my nostrils oh the water does nothing why did I do this!?” while my wife laughed.

The southwestern tip of Manhattan is a residential area with a number of parks, generally known by some variation of Battery Park overall, that name deriving from the military batteries that were installed in this area of the city in the late seventeenth century. The park was built in the middle of the nineteenth century after the area had attracted some theatres and become regarded as a destination for entertainment, and prior to the more well-known entry point for immigrants of Ellis Island being used, it was here at the Battery that arrivals were first processed.

If you’re a fan of sculptures – we are – then this area hosts a number of them in what’s generally given the name Monuments Walk. We weren’t aware of this at the time and our walk clearly skipped a lot of them but we did stop and stare at the rather odd piece by Louise Bourgeois.

Boobs, we thought.

Eyes, apparently.

Louise Bourgeois, as you might know, is more widely-known for her Maman sculptures (even if you don’t know the name then you almost certainly know the pieces), and I’m happy to say we’ve seen one of them at the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

The building in the photos below caught my eye for its overall orange hues but also its blocks of colours on the facades. This was the Whitehall Building, a very early twentieth century office block, incredibly simple in its design, but still striking, and likely quite a sight for those approaching New York’s Manhattan borough from the water.

Our walk around New York was taking us in an anti-clockwise direction around the southern tip of Manhattan now, and the next point of interest to catch our eyes was the East Coast Memorial. This monument commemorates American servicemen who died in coastal waters during World War II. The names are arranged on granite blocks in two rows, in the centre of which – you can see this in the second photo below – is an eagle cast in bronze, facing the harbour and the Statue of Liberty.

Despite us not having any firm plans for what to do on a Sunday in New York, as explained earlier, we did know that the Staten Island Ferry service between Manhattan and Staten Island (obviously) ran every day of the year, regularly, free of charge, and would take us past New York City’s most famous landmark. This was 2011, before our big love of cruising really took off, but we’ve always had a fondness for being on or near the water, so a chance to take the weight off our feet and enjoy the scenery from the bay had been in the back of our mind before we’d even set foot outside the hotel that morning.

Our trip out and back again – 25 minutes each way and requiring disembarkation, then re-embarkation during the turnaround – was aboard the MV John F. Kennedy. At the time of writing this she is the last of the Kennedy-class vessels on the Staten Island run.

Sometimes you see something in real life and think “Wow! That’s a lot bigger than I thought!” The Statue of Liberty was exactly the opposite of that. Making allowances for the fact that it was far away (thanks, Father Ted) it still didn’t strike either of us as that impressive seeing it for the first time. I suspect that if we’d visited it and stood at its base then we may have come away with a different impression, but I wonder if the isolation and lack of nearby features against which to compare it had an impact here. It was still great to see it – an iconic sculpture is an iconic sculpture – and it’s a great feat of design and engineering, but I was expecting just a little more… something. If we return to New York City then we’ll try to have a more extended visit and we will, of course, give it another chance to make our mouths go Ooh!

For the remainder of the time on the ferry we contented ourselves to watching the various land masses of New York and the bridges connecting them rolling by first in one direction, then the next, along with a fair amount of people-watching. You could tell the tourists from the locals easily enough and one particular local inhabitant was intensely entertaining: a girl in her early-twenties with headphones on stood in front of us, eyes closed, completely lost in her music, dancing, shaking her hips, clicking her fingers, twisting, singing a little bit. That her backside was roughly level with my face and only a few feet away was what stopped me from taking any photos, but I was happy to smile at the sight and we could see other people around grinning too. The ones who were ignoring her were, I suspect, used to the spectacle.

That brings this first part of our Manhattan photowalk travelogue mini-series to an end. In the next part we’ll head through the financial district and on a mostly direct route through New York City; a chance for me to lose myself as just another tourist taking way too many photos of people with more of an emphasis on street photography.

It’s fortunate that I’d thought to sling my older DSLR and kit lens into the suitcase at all – I’d harboured an inkling that maybe my wife would want to use it (nope) – because this did give me a fallback option to simply using my phone, but it just wasn’t the same.

This was the second visit we’d made to the United States in two years and both to similar geographical locations as the main purpose of the trip was to pay a visit to my wife’s sister who was living there at the time for work-related reasons. Our America 2011 trip saw us based in Virginia at my sister-in-law’s apartment with occasional hops across the state border to Maryland where her boyfriend was based. In 2012 we actually stayed with the boyfriend as his house was substantially larger (everything’s bigger in America) and we were also travelling with my in-laws this time since their US-based daughter was now pregnant. Both spots weren’t too far from Washington, D.C. hence us checking the place out both years.

When we’d seen the city in 2011 – Washington, D.C., 2011 – it had just been the pair of us and we’d hit museums and galleries because those are the sorts of things that interest us. For 2012 there was less of that as it didn’t interest others quite as much (plus we’d done it before, plus I was still fuming about leaving my camera at home), hence the following photos being mostly just external shots of some of the American capital’s tourist landmarks.

Brace yourself now for some photographs of the White House, the Jefferson Memorial, the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial, just like every other person who visits Washington, D.C. While the material for the buildings and structures and general appearance looks similar and aesthetically-pleasing it’s interesting to see the different styles of architecture surprisingly working seamlessly together.

Those photos were obviously from a simple walk along the length of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and if you’ve never visited the city before then you can expect to do the same thing when you eventually do because everyone does.

During this trip we hit the city of Washington twice. On the second occasion we made for the Chinatown area in order to have a meal together; sister-in-law and boyfriend, parents-in-law, and my wife and me. The place we ate at was Tony Cheng‘s, an Asian restaurant, and while I can’t remember the specific details of why we ate there – it might have been because our anniversary and my in-laws’ anniversary had all been in that week but it could easily have also been to celebrate the pregnancy, or both, or none – and I can’t recall what we ate, I’m going to assume it was good because we didn’t really have a bad meal in America. I can tell you that some of us had Polynesian Grog cocktails, though.

Although I’ve mentioned it on other posts from this trip to America I’ll repeat it again here: this was the trip that forever sends shivers down my spine. We’d needed to fly out from Heathrow early in the morning so we’d awoken at some horrible hour in the dark and grabbed the bags from the room where they’d been stored the evening before and headed off. And about halfway to the airport some tired part of my brain suddenly perked up and said:

Hey, remember how dark it was this morning? And remember how the room with the bags in has a black floor? And remember how the suitcases were bright yellow so you packed them in the car? And remember how the camera bag is black in a dark room on a black floor? Any recollection of picking that up?

The Trip Where I Forgot To Bring My Camera. Still horrifying to think about. I did have a camera as I’d put my older DSLR in a case on the slight chance that my wife might have wanted to use it. She never had before but there was always a first time. So, armed with not the camera I wanted and only the single lens it had on it plus my phone I was still able to take some shots but my photographic heart was never quite in the right place.

It was a lovely November day to visit Baltimore’s historic seaport and tourist attraction; clear skies and a clean crispness in the air. The transformation of the Inner Harbour from a dead and decaying, formerly-industrialised, shallow port abandoned by visiting vessels in the 1950s due to economic changes into a thriving spot for recreation became a model for waterfront renewal around the world. Parks and museums were erected and hotels and other attractions such as an aquarium and a science centre were built following a flood of tourism in the wake of the tall ships making a stop during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations.

Our interest was in the floating museum ships. Photos from three of the ships can be found in earlier travel portfolio posts here:

• USCGC Taney – the last floating survivor during the attack on Pearl Harbour
• USS Torsk – the American naval vessel to sink the last enemy ship in World War 2
• USS Constellation – the flagship of the Union’s anti-slave trade African Squadron in the American Civil War and the last sail-only warship built by the US Navy

We also visited the United States Lightship Chesapeake. If you’re as much a fan of sci-fi as me then you too will be disappointed to learn that the name has no bearing on its means of propulsion, instead referring to its use as a lighthouse. Launched in 1930 and used in World War 2 to protect Boston, Chesapeake, like all lightships, was mothballed in the 1960s as permanent lighthouses were built and automated buoys become more commonplace.

The only blot on the landscape of Baltimore’s otherwise attractive harbour area was the prevalence of homeless people there, some of whom we saw rifling through litter bins. This isn’t unique to Baltimore, of course – our visits to Washington D.C. were real eye-openers as to just how many homeless people there were, and every city around the world will have its share – but it is still something that simply shouldn’t be possible to happen in supposedly rich countries supposedly proud of their supposedly Christian values.

The last of the museums we visited was not a ship but was still maritime-themed, this being the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse. Built and first lit in the 1850s then rebuilt in wrought iron in 1875, this cylindrical, screw-pile lighthouse became automated in 1949 and was deactivated in 1988. It was then moved from its location at the mouth of the Patapsco River to one of the piers in the Inner Harbour and turned into a museum. While not very large and not containing an awful lot to see other than attractive views it did have a very entertaining custodian who was immensely pleased to discover we were not only from England but also from a historic naval city and we ended up talking to him for ages.

Our trip to Baltimore wasn’t a long one but the Inner Harbour was beautiful and there was plenty to see and do there for several more trips should we find ourselves visiting again.

You can read about our time wandering around and exploring the very attractive city of Boston here: Boston, Massachusetts.

I don’t remember which hotel we stayed at (one of the problems with not booking it yourself) but we started game day with a drink and some lunch in the hotel bar. With this being a little bit before I started saving all information and documenting more about the trips we were taking there are no records of what we ate but I’m fairly certain we had crab cakes because that’s what the area is famous for.

We then headed off to Gillette Stadium with one stop at a roadside cafe/restaurant/bar on the outskirts first for something else to eat and drink. Again, I can’t say what place for certain but the parts about this visit that stick in the memory were all alcohol-related. We ordered some beers and watched as the barmaid poured into an upright glass, tipped out the 4/5ths of foam, topped it up, tipped out the 2/3rds of foam, topped it up, etc. We just looked at each other and mouthed “Tip the glass when pouring” but didn’t want to interrupt. She then got someone else’s order wrong so came along the bar to me who was already drinking the thing she’d inadvertently poured and told me it was a free one. Finally, Will ordered a shot of tequila (for warmth as it was a bit chilly) and what turned up was close to a full whiskey tumbler with the Mexican alcohol in. Maybe that’s how they just do shots there but even Will was shocked. He tried to down it in one but failed and took three attempts.

We carried on to one of the vast parking lots that sit on the outside of Patriot Place and walked past numerous people hosting tailgate events from the back of their vehicles. The sun was long down by now and it was getting extremely cold but the gates to the stadium weren’t yet open so – and this might come as a shock – we made our way to a bar in the complex where another drink was had and we could get some shelter from the biting November wind as well as absorb some heat generated by the crowds of Patriot fans doing the same as us.

The game we were in Massachusetts to watch was the New England Patriots taking on the Kansas City Chiefs. We hadn’t really known anything else other than that prior to the game and were incredibly pleased to find out we had really good seats at the end of a row, fairly low down and almost on the 35-yard line. We were on the Patriots side of the field so had great views of the New England sideline and many of its star players (Tom Brady included, naturally) and were in our seats with drinks in plenty of time for the warm-ups to start.

We got to see Patriots owner Robert Kraft up fairly close too while he was being interviewed by the Monday Night Football team and meeting other important people.

And Will even wanted a photo taken on his phone by my wife just to prove he was in the stadium so I snagged a sneaky shot of him at the same time.

Before the game started properly there were still the rituals of the coin toss to sit through and the national anthem to stand for. We were looking forward to some action starting soon on the field by this point as the temperature was plummeting. On the way into the stadium both Will and I had bought some gloves from a vendor selling them from a stall as we hadn’t thought that far ahead when coming up to New England. My wife was sensibly dressed in multiple layers, gloves, and even the fur hat she’d picked up several years earlier from China (see: Diamond Princess Cruise Memorabilia) that numerous people in the stadium remarked on, mostly to comment how nice and warm her Russian hat looked which led every time to an explanation about the differences between the hammer and sickle design and the single red star.

And then the game between the Patriots and Chiefs started and it was absolutely fantastic; everything we hoped it would be. Our seating location meant it was a short walk onto the main concourse and the concessions stands so we were able to keep topped up with drinks (first cold and beer-based, then piping hot coffee-based just to get some circulation back into the fingers) and hot dogs (again, primarily just to hold in the hands for a bit before eating them).

By the end of the first quarter I was so cold I found a stand selling warm-looking hoodies and bought one to put over the top of the three layers I was already wearing. I still wear it when it gets cold these days and I’ve never seen anyone else wearing anything even close to the throwback design, making it my most-treasured souvenir of our time at Gillette Stadium.

Directly behind us in the stadium was a Patriots fan who was a dead-ringer for George Clinton. He was wearing a bobble hat barely covering his dreads, shades, had gold grills filling his mouth, was wearing Patriots hoodie and jersey and gloves, and was wrapped in a Patriots blanket. Every time Brady had the ball we would hear this rasping shout from behind us.

“Throw it to Ocho!”

“Man, he is not even on the field!” Will said on one occasion, turning around. It was true; Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson wasn’t playing. By way of response all we heard was a raspy giggle and it did nothing to stop our fellow Patriot fan from offering impossible advice from his seat throughout the rest of the game until he fell asleep in the third quarter leading to some stewards coming across to check if he was still alive.

It wouldn’t be a sports event without some kind of terrible officiating and this game was no exception leading to several streams of expletives from Will. Spotting that the man in front was attending with his teenaged son we urged Will to tone it down but the father turned around and told us it was nothing his son hadn’t heard before so it was all fine. Will started stealing some of the sweets that the son was eating while the father then chatted to us for a bit as he’d recognised we weren’t from around those parts. This wasn’t the first time someone in the vicinity had stopped us to chat upon hearing our accents as we’d also been forced to sit up front with the shuttle bus driver at the airport to talk as soon as he realised we were from England. Always lovely to have such a friendly experience with locals when you’re travelling abroad.

It’s interesting and almost a little disconcerting looking back at these photos nearly seven years on and seeing pictures like these with Brady, Gronk, and Aaron Hernandez before his fall from grace.

We left before the end of the fourth quarter as Will had almost turned blue and wanted to beat the bulk of the crowd trying to leave the stadium in order to head back to Boston. The game was well and truly over by then anyway with the Patriots running out 34-3 winners over the Chiefs. Despite being frozen to the bone ourselves we wouldn’t have changed a thing about the experience and if we ever got the chance to attend a Patriots game in Foxborough on an icy Monday night in winter again we’d have absolutely no hesitation in doing so. Gillette Stadium was great, well-designed, easy to find your way around, and with plenty of concessions to keep your energy levels up while the New England temperatures do their worst.

The first day we paid a visit to Reston was on a Sunday, just after we’d had a tour of Orbital and got to see some satellites being built and prepared on sound stages designed to simulate launch noise and vibration conditions. While my sister-in-law’s company were dealing with communications satellites some of the other builds we saw included the Cygnus spacecraft that perform part of the regular run of supplies and removal of waste from the International Space Station. Following our private tour (no photos for obvious reasons) we headed into Reston for lunch and so that we could experience what it was like to be in an American bar watching American Football (before actually experiencing the activity at first hand when we’d later hit Massachusetts).

We travelled to America in November so one of the first things we spotted in Reston was an ice rink that we assumed was just there for the holiday period. An outdoors rink prior to this point was something I’d never seen outside a movie before so it was great to see. In recent years they’ve started appearing towards the end of the year locally too, though, so it wouldn’t be quite the wow moment these days.

Reston itself was very clean and very typical of what we expected from an American city but in a reasonably small town; very straight roads, zones for specific activities. The reason for this was simply that Reston was a fairly young town and had been planned in that way rather than evolving in the more natural way that we see towns and cities here in Europe. Whether it was because it was a Sunday or whether it was because of the time of year or whether it was because, being planned and being American, people didn’t really live anywhere near where things actually were (they do like getting around in their cars an awful lot over there) I can’t say for sure but there was a very quiet, almost empty, wasted feel to the place. This is not necessarily a bad thing for a traveller to experience as any cultural difference is a welcome one but I’m not sure it’s a place I’d like to live in. We felt the same way about Washington DC when we were there but to contrast that I absolutely loved New York.

Architecturally, there were some lovely pieces to feast the eye on in Reston: some very American-looking diners and signs and a building with more than a hint of art deco styling grabbed my attention most of all.

The bar we were heading to was Clyde’s. This was a place known to my wife’s sister and her boyfriend and somewhere that the guy who’d taken us around Orbital knew as well and who we had arranged to meet there for drinks. While the place had a sit-down restaurant area it was at the bar that we located ourselves and where we enjoyed some beers and some food in that very magical American way where the bar staff seem to remember around ten people’s different orders before fetching them flawlessly in sequence and coping with interruptions of new orders too. No idea how they manage it. We had a few chats with some of the locals once our accents were overheard and the most interesting conversation was when someone at the bar asked what the time was and I showed my phone to him. Apparently, seeing the time written in 24-hour clock notation format was the most incredible thing ever and a small group of people gathered to stare at the readout and check their own phones to confirm that they’d never seen such a mystical way of telling the time. Weird how the tiniest cultural differences can be the most memorable. Football was watched on TV (the bar supported the Redskins because of its proximity to Washington), a good time was had by all, and it was here that we were served our very first Baby Guinness cocktail (with Patrón XO Cafe), a drink we make at home to this day because it’s just so very good.

We returned to Reston towards the end of our stay in Virginia. We hadn’t planned this part of the trip but the timing was such that our holiday in America coincided with Thanksgiving and the following day they held a parade in the town. You can see photos of the parade here: Reston, VA, Thanksgiving Parade 2011.

As we’d arrived early to stake out a spot and we would hang around for a while afterwards in order that the majority of people could pile into their cars and disperse first this gave me a lot of opportunity to just shoot some people gathering or wandering around the streets of Reston. On the walk towards the parade route from where we’d parked our car we passed through the town square park where some abstract art sculptures caught my eye against the crisp, clear November sky.

From there on (parade itself notwithstanding) it was mainly the people who had come to Reston who grabbed my attention. Taking photos of people doing absolutely normal activities on the streets is something I used to do quite a lot (and obviously did back in 2011) but my focus has definitely shifted more to the travel locations these days. It’s interesting to me, looking back at photos like this, to see how much enjoyment I can get from a snapshot of a mainly meaningless moment of time.

All of these photos were taken with my 100mm L-series prime lens as well which is a lens not ideally suited for street photography but which does produce some lovely shots nonetheless. Being a tourist at a crowded event like the Reston parade obviously lends itself well to taking these sorts of photos and it’s something I might try to drag myself back into; to be able to capture both the essence of the place as well as the people makes for the best travel photography in my opinion.

This is an abbreviated post of the New York walk with a small number of photos (for me) and with the original image processing when uploaded to Flickr. More in-depth posts covering the full walk along with refreshed photo processing will come along at some future point.

We were staying in a central location on Manhattan Island so decided to walk west towards the Hudson River, then follow the island shoreline as much as possible to the south initially.

We ended up passing through the financial area where the twin towers had come down and in which the Freedom Tower was under construction.

We knew we could use the Staten Island Ferry for free and that it purportedly gave one of the better views of the Statue of Liberty. This seemed to be true but I was more interested in the people on the ferry itself, each lost in their own world, none more so than one girl who danced to the tunes playing through her headphones as if nobody was watching.

After returning to Manhattan we walked more directly back in the direction of our hotel. With New York’s grid structure of busy roads this provided plenty of chances to take photos of not just the feel of the city’s roads and shops…

…but also some of its architecture…

…and the many people of New York going about their business.

We had to leave New York early the next morning (a Monday). It was here that we discovered that the so-called “city that never sleeps” does, actually, as none of the stores we wanted to visit before catching our bus were open. On top of that it was raining. Still, I very much enjoyed New York; the ability to lose yourself as a tourist among the crowds of a major city makes for great street photography.

Photos from the Taney’s exterior and on its deck taken on my phone:

Photos from inside the Taney:

The bus from Washington D.C. to New York was fine; the trip wasn’t too long or too dull and as we approached New York itself I became very glad I hadn’t considered borrowing or renting a car as the traffic was nightmarish. We arrived fairly late in the evening and had a terrifying fifteen minutes while the hotel we booked into hunted for our reservation that had somehow been misplaced. It was eventually sorted, we freshened up, then hit the streets of New York to see just how alive it was at night.

I don’t tend to take photos at night because I’ve always had a bit of an aversion to high ISO shots and noise but I forced myself past that for the vibrancy of the American city. The neon lights were everything we expected as was the amount of traffic but I don’t think we’d banked on quite so many people being out and about, locals or tourists. Stalls were everywhere: artists, touts for shows or city tours, and this was around midnight. I took photos here and there before we grabbed some food in a specialist burger place and called it a night.

In the main hangar the big attraction was the SR-71 Blackbird which is just a beautiful-looking plane with some fantastic lines and curves to it.

An attached section to the main hangar in the museum housed spacecraft, including the star attraction of the Space Shuttle Discovery. It’s a lot larger than I imagined it would be and it was a fantastic experience to be able to walk around and take photos of something that had spent just over a year in space across its dozens of flights.