A nice long walk
My things have been in Albany since last weekend; I even managed to unpack a bit, and set up most of my studio gear (which is good, ’cause Reeves is coming to town tomorrow night for some Jeebus trackin). But I spent the week downstate – I had to run right back for a couple days of work in NYC. Then there was a wedding in New Jersey which lasted all weekend, as LB was a bridesmaid… so I haven’t spent but a night or two in my new place since moving in.
The wedding ended at five and we booked up here. There was still a bit of daylight yet, and it was springy and clear. We decided to take a nice long walk.
There’s nothing like a good walk. It’s the only exercise I’m interested in. Fuck treadmills and ellipticals at the gym… if I’m going to put one foot in front of the other, I had better be getting somewhere. When LB and I lived on the Lower East Side, we would step out and walk for hours – over the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, or across town and up the West Side Promenade. You might have to deal with the occasional crowd of smokers in front of a restaurant or club, but they weren’t that big a deal. It was the move to Dumbo that kinda killed walking for us. The combination of obnoxious tourists and even more obnoxious locals, all taking shitty pictures of the same stupid crap while their whiny kids shrieked and rolled around on the dirty cobblestones – that got old fast. We eventually stopped going outside.
Tonight we decided to chance it in our new home. We spent a couple of hours exploring parts of downtown Albany I wasn’t familiar with, particularly the area east of the Empire State Plaza. This city just goes on and on! We came across all this stuff I never knew was here: wonderful buildings of all eras, dating back as far as the 1730s; a waterfront; a main drag similar to Saratoga’s Broadway; and Brooklynesque industrial areas, but with a backdrop of rolling hills. It was incredible, and there was nobody on the streets… we had all this to ourselves.
I took three photos around the Plaza, which is right across the street from our new place. I took them for this blog post, to illustrate the dearth of humanity in this gorgeous setting on a warm and bright spring evening. Just the way I like it: the only douchebag with a camera was me.
Then we stopped into Justin’s for meatloaf and mac n’ cheese. And their peppery, velvety coffee, which was just as good as I remember from ten years ago. May I recommend moving to Albany?