A (long) walk in the park

Continuing with the NYC recap...

Day 2, Sunday, dawned gray, cloudy, and cool, but B kindly watched the weather forecast, which promised blue skies and sun. Additionally, his iPhone weather forecast displayed a sun next to the day, so we bravely left the umbrella in the room while we set out on the day's adventures.

After our heavy (I don't understand how people can eat bacon on a daily basis) but free breakfast, we walked east toward the Queensboro Bridge and Sutton Place Park in search of another Cinghiale statue. We were alerted to its presence by the Wikipedia page and wanted another photo to complement our collection. Sutton Place Park appears to be a series of parks, and the first one that we visited did not house the statue, but the second park did. Number 4, check! I'll post pics of the boar and more in another post.

While heading towards our little piggy, we noticed a large number of NYC police officers standing on street corners, and some were erecting barriers. We also noticed a large number of people with Puerto Rico flags, both in their hands and on their cars. Could it be...did our minibreak coincide with...the Puerto Rican Day parade?

B grabbed his iPhone and confirmed--yes, the city was to be blessed with a massive parade that day. The parade was on Fifth Avenue between 40-something-th and 80-something-th, so we decided that our best course of action was to get on the west side of Fifth and stay there all day, or go far enough uptown so that we could cross on the other side of the parade. As it turned out, we spent most of the day in Central Park, so we were largely insulated from the parade (though the horns, whistles, bass, and screams from the crowd did occasionally make it through the leafy barriers).

We did our best to complete two of the walking tours through the park, though parts of the park were closed off "due to the parade." We surmised that perhaps there were crowd control issues in years past and they were simply trying to contain the excitement to the parade route. We saw the skating rink (which was an amusement park, since it's a bit too warm to maintain a rink in the summer), the Imagine mosaic, Shakespeare park, the Tavern on the Green (I know it's sort of a cliche/tourist restaurant, but it looked like it would be magical to eat there, especially at night), the zoo (didn't go in, just walked past), the Dairy (which is now a visitor center/gift shop, but was originally intended to feature women dressed as milkmaids, milking cows, and giving the milk free of charge to the poor children of NYC), and several bodies of water. We took a ride on the carousel (much faster than I expected, and lots of fun) and rented a rowboat in the lake (according to B, a much better constructed boat compared to those we rented in Madrid and Barcelona).

After many hours of fun in the sun (it did eventually come out), we were ready for food, so we exited the park in the Upper West Side (near the Dakota) and walked back to midtown and our hotel.

All of those blocks left us a bit tired (and by a bit, I mean I felt like I could not go on), so we stopped off at the hotel for a rest and decided to tackle a less ambitious (that is, a closer) restaurant for lunch. We went to a nearby pizza place that B had visited before. It reminded me of a great pizza place in my college town, only it was about twice as expensive and not quite as imaginative with toppings. However, when you wait until mid-afternoon to eat lunch, imaginative toppings are not always your top priority.

After lunch, we decided that we had had enough fun for one weekend, so we returned to the hotel, finished packing, hopped into an exciting cab ride to Grand Central Station, and were on our way home.

In sad news, my legs are still sore from our extensive walking, proof that it's time to get in shape, girl, or else, because we're planning a return trip to the city, and I don't intend to invite pain on the trip this time.