A Recent Visit to Washington Square Park in the Village (NYC)

 

Last weekend, I paid a relatively rare visit to New York City. Used to go to the city fairly often when I was younger. There were points when I seemed to go there at least once a week or so. At the very least, not a month would go by, generally speaking, without my visiting New York City at least once, regardless of the reason that brought my into the Big Apple.

As I grew older, however, such trips became less and less common. I still went once I got past my late teens and early twenties, but only so much. By the time I was in my thirties, those trips became infrequent. Once I hot my forties, they became rather rare indeed.

In fact, about the only time that I made a point of visiting the city was to take my son on some trips. Usually, maybe two times or so a year, we would go to New York City just for a day visit. It felt like something worth doing for him.

Now, my son is pretty much grown up. As I write this, he is less than two days (less than 36 hours) away from his 20th birthday. Yes, this teen years are basically about to be behind him. So he has his own thing going. Thus, those trips to the city have not happened in quite a while. 

That translates to trips to the city having become really rare. So rare, in fact, that it seemed to me for a while that I might not even make it into New York City once this calendar year of 2025.

But then tickets to Sarah McLachlan's album signing event at Barnes & Noble in Union Square in September became available. I got tickets for that, as well as another event: a Joe Hill book signing event in October.

So it went from seeming like I would not make it even once into the Big Apple to making it there on two separate trips slightly more than a month apart from one another. For the Hill event, which was basically right in the middle of an afternoon when I otherwise normally would have been working, I actually took the day off. That presented an opportunity to go into the city early and spending some time visiting, which is what I did. 

Both of the visits offered at least a small opportunity to visit the city. But the McLachlan event was in the evening. It was not an all-day thing, and I got there a little early. Yet, there really was not much of an opportunity to visit the city beyond the immediate vicinity, which meant Union Square Park, Strand's Bookstore, and Forbidden Planets, which meant the usual when I visit this area. 

The Joe Hill event on a beautiful autumn afternoon in late October, on the other hand, gave me a chance for a longer visit. I focused on visiting the Village.