Not native, never will be

My two readers already know this, but as of this Friday, July 31st, I will say good-bye to New York City, and subsequently, this blog. I had the best intentions of staying in New York for at least two years to experience life on the East Coast: the golden autumn, snowy winter, sprightly spring, and sweltering summer. The pizza, bagels, wings, and Shake Shack. And the subway trains and cab rides, the masses of people and the tall buildings.I managed to do a lot of the things I wanted during my time here, including:

• An off-Broadway play, "God of Carnage" (of which I had always meant to blog about and which actually won a Tony award this year)
• a ballet production of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Lincoln Center
• a New Yorker Festival event
• a Mets game
• a NY Rangers game
• an air guitar regional championship
• the AIDS Walk
• visits to the Guggenheim, Natural History Museum, MOMA
• Afternoons talking bikes at Continuum Cycles
• 2 trips to Fire Island
• 2 trips to Naples, Fl
• 1 trip to London
  
• a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge
• Many visits to Pegu Club and to our local Community Food and Juice (which was blighted by a kitchen fire what seems like many months ago, boo! Re-open before we leave, please?)
• Many bike rides through Manhattan, Central Park and along the Hudson
  

All fun activities that made me fall in love with this city. But I also spent the whole year alternately wishing each of my respective home cities, San Francisco and New York, could be a little more like the other. Unfortunately, I think I will always suffer from wanderlust. Thank you, New York. I guess if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.

Biking along the Greenway

New York City: simply saying those words conjures up images of honking yellow taxi cabs, a maze of whirring subway lines, and Pace picante salsa. But it's amazing how much the city really opens up to you on a bike. Yesterday, we took our fixies out for a ride along the Greenway path that circles the island. What a great city resource! The light wasn't so great, and I only had my iPhone camera on me, but the weather was just fine for a bike ride. We started by heading down the West Side Highway bike path.From there, we went all the way down, past the ambling tourists, through Battery Park to South Street where we could see the Brooklyn Bridge and the clipper ship in the distance.We decided not to ride into Brooklyn this time, but paused to admire the bridge from its base.Biking further east, we passed the Manhattan Bridge.We almost made it to the Williamsburg Bridge, but decided to get off the path for a late lunch of panini from 'Inoteca (home of the famous egg truffle toast).This time, we ordered the coppa, pepperocini spread, and fontina panino and the fontina, roasted garlic, and red chili panino, mmm.
From there, we did a bit of dodgy weaving between cars and cabs on Houston to get back to the West Side Highway path for a straight shot home.