That jet travel is still such a miracle to me may be sign I don't get out enough. Packing up and getting ready to clear the room in Manhattan yesterday morning, I was marveling that I would be going to sleep that evening in my own bed at the other edge of the continent.

The trip was mostly lovely. We tromped through a lot of neighborhoods and visited several spectacular museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we spent two non-consecutive days. The second day was my 40th birthday. My friend paid my admission and later bought me dinner.

It was the best 40th birthday I could have had.

About the museums, about the Met in particular, it isn't that we don't do our best out here in the Bay Area. We have the San Francisco MoMA, the de Young, and others. From time to time, these places get decent traveling exhibitions of one sort and another. But any one of the famous art museums in New York City beats the West Coast cold, for sheer grandeur and scope of collections on regular display. The Met seems to be the flagship attraction, the one you recommend to tourists who have time for only one museum. I'm afraid the artwork and artifact displays at this place are of a caliber we simply will never touch.

I will probably discuss display design more later, but for now will say paintings at the Met are eye-level and you can get close enough to these priceless centuries-old canvases to see brush strokes and cracks in the paint. What a headache for the museum, keeping artworks so accessible. They must employ guards to bark at people who touch, and even who seem to be getting too close.

I did take pictures, emphasizing my favorite works, though battling displays' dim lighting and prohibitions against flash was pretty maddening and resulted in many blurred exposures. Before too long, I look forward to upstreaming photos, with my colorful, if inexpert, commentary.

Man, did I eat. During that trip, a bear on the very best day of raiding trunks in Yosemite Park had nothing on me. New York City, at least Manhattan, seems to be dotted with inauspicious-looking dives that serve awesome food--soul, Cuban, Chinese, Dominican--or whatever. We ate at a few nicer places, too, including an outstanding Turkish restaurant (with an outstanding Happy Hour) on the evening of my birthday. Like a Yosemite bear, it will be difficult to wean myself from such unaccustomed, rich, and varied fare, and back onto my regular diet.

Oh, yeah. I met Morgan face-to-face. I was slightly apprehensive, but it turns out he's a much softer, more affable presence than what you'd gather from his sterner prose. I pointed out to him that it's odd we readers know far more about his pooch than we do about his wife, but he explained she's very protective of her anonymity for professional reasons. She doesn't comment, though apparently she does lurk.

It mostly didn't rain, but I found the weather uncomfortably chilly. I noticed a downward progression in the autumn temperatures, over a mere 10 days. I told Morgan the day we met, Sunday, the 23rd, that the New York City weather was like the coldest it ever got at home. The fall temperatures here were like a typical Bay Area winter. The lows were getting down to the high 40s Fahrenheit, with the highs in the 50s and 60s. In time, however, the low temperatures were consistently reaching the low 40s, with the highs barely cracking 50, and a biting wind. At home, you'd call these temperatures atypical, even in January, a "cold spell." I didn't want to be outside much.

Accommodation in New York City is a touchy subject for those of us who can't afford the $250 a night for a middle-of-the-road hotel in Manhattan, or who just wouldn't be comfortable sleeping in a room that costly. We stayed at a hostel. This was the non-lovely aspect of our trip, due to crowding, lack of privacy, and nocturnal noise. I've come home with a case of sniffles I believe I picked up there. Our lodging gave me empathy for the city's slum dwellers of yore, even before our Tenement Museum tour. If you must sleep in a hostel, all I can recommend is to try to line up an adults-only place if you can, and to bring some good earplugs.

That concludes my preliminary travelogue. I will probably write more in time.
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