LEAVING THE ISLAND (MANHATTAN)

 Today we did the unthinkable.  We left the island of Manhattan.  Gasp!  And went all the way to Brooklyn, which could possibly be the end of the world. We did make a brief stop at the 9-11 memorial, which we will be visiting tomorrow, so we could pick up our tickets because we couldn't print them here. It was fortunate, because it's kind of a hassle to go to the place where you pick up the free tickets you've already ordered on line, and that place is a little bit of a hike from the actual memorial.

One picture from that area. More tomorrow when we actually go to the Memorial. The police had blocked off a part of this street to cars, apparently because there was a very minor chance there was something dangerous about this van (they're checking the underside with mirrors in this picture) but I think it was just some hapless person who parked illegally. Interestingly enough, they weren't keeping pedestrians away. Our trip to Brooklyn started out badly because John had difficulty with his metro card, which meant we had to wait 20 minutes before he could use it again, and we thought we'd use those 20 minutes to find another metro station, which turned out to be more difficult than we thought. Eventually, we were successfully on the train to Brooklyn, armed with directions of how to get from the subway to DUMBO (which stands for Directly Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) or something like that. When we got there, we were totally disoriented. Here's a number of pictures of how we spent our day in Brooklyn:

When we found DUMBO, it was much easier than the directions we were given. It was also somewhat less exciting than we had expected. I suspect this is the iconic picture of the area. (It's kind of an arts district, but not all that lively on a Monday afternoon, and the area used to be all abandoned warehouses and the like.) We actually had a good time, and did a lot of walking. We eventually walked up around the Borough Hall and checked out the pedestrian mall that I swear looks like 10th St. Modesto in the 50s. Very busy, nothing over three stories high, etc. I took a picture, but it wasn't good. We ended our little trip by having a pizza at a cute little restaurant called Bevacco.