Announcement >
TravelBloggerBuzz is sponsoring the L&B pizza dinner stop. He's buying all the pizza you can eat.
Thank you George.
http://travelbloggerbuzz.com/
Seats are available.
Notes from last year...
The catchphrase of
BRT this year was
Janice, write it down. It started as a joke. Since I changed BRT this year, I planned a rough schedule for the day. I started with departure, then added the first stop, the second stop, and on and on. I also had to plan the day to be back at 46th street by 10:00. That meant I had to back things out. ie L&B for pizza at 6:00, the Promenade no later than 8:30.
To begin:
The bus was 15 minutes late. Our driver was Flo. That was a new first for us. She wasn't always paying attention, but then half of her mistakes were due to the tour guide giving her last minute instructions.
There was some traffic on 2nd Ave, but in spite of that, we arrived at
Smorgasburg at 11:15 vs 11:00. Sort of on time, since she arrive late.
Everyone enjoyed the 45 minute stop last year, so I decided to make this a 90 minute lunch stop. It was one of those sunny, hot LA summer days. Strong sun. Some started back to the bus at 75 minutes.
From here we headed to Green-Wood Cemetery. We were denied entry since we were a tour. Oh well. I briefly talked about the cemetery. A few took photos of the entrance, and CMK managed to take a few additional pictures. Believe it or not, we were on time when we left. The denied entry saved 30 minutes.
We moved on to the
Verrazano Bridge. We got off the bus for 10 minutes to view the bridge, and The Narrows (entry to NY Harbor ((Harbour)).
I kept telling Janice to write it down, referring to arrival/departure times. I wanted to review this to see how it matched up with my schedule, and revise plans for next year.
We headed to the Boardwalk in
Coney Island. I usually herd riders, but this time I told them to be back on the bus in 45 minutes. When I finally made it to the Boardwalk, I saw just 2 regulars hanging out. Where'dya all go? Nathan's for a hot dog aka frank.
The
Cyclone was closed. We saw that it was stuck, and the newspaper reported that on Sunday. From Coney Island, we headed to Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach. As we drove along Brighton Beach Ave. Paula (a friend of Janice and Dan) was telling us about her mom and dads grocery store. It was her first visit back to the old neighborhood in 40 years. She would later send me an e mail that the tour brought a tear to her eye.
We headed to the
Old Dutch Reformed Church, then onto my boyhood home.
A trip through
Crown Heights, before heading to Starbucks (bathroom was closed for renovation) in the cool/hip Park Slope neighborhood.
We backtracked to
L&B for pizza, then the bakery. We departed at 7:30 to arrive at the promenade at 8:00. The plan was to see Manhattan from the Brooklyn side at twilight. That's something we've never done. The lit up buildings at night are breathtaking. While this wasn't experienced due to timing, we had an unintended consequence >>> a brilliant sunset.
As we walked back to the bus,
jackal aka
www.autoslash.com greeted us with 2 pizzas from the very famous, and #1 pizza place in Brooklyn
Di Fara's.
This was the
Moment of BRT 16. Every tour has its moment.
We headed back to the city and arrived at 9:45pm.
Nice seeing the oldtimers again, including the 3 years in a row
dinoscool3, mom, and dad.
Nice meeting the 6 new screen names too!! Can I expect to see you next year?