On traveling to New York City

Our gang took a road trip to New York City, where I had not been since a DRI conference in 2005 and not just for fun since 1995.

In the circumstances, it was a great adventure - the Amtrak to Penn Station, the subway, the Top of the Rock, the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, seeing The Phantom of the Opera again at the Majestic. It was no less of an adventure for having done some of the same things thirty or twenty or seven years ago.

Along the way, the train passed by among other things the Philadelphia Zoo, where I saw their oldest gorilla in the Spring of 1983. The train crossed the Susquehanna, skirted the Chesapeake, and cruised past the D.C. monuments and some of the Johns Hopkins buildings in Baltimore.

And, passing by all these places and thinking of different times I had been there, I thought of another part of the Roger Ebert book, where he described the comfort he derived from familiar places, with the thought that "I have been here, I am here now, I will be here again."