Riding along Route 36 in the waning hours of the day, I realized that winter and spring had given way to the dog-days of summer. While I focused on memorizing inane legal rules for the bar exam, the foothills had bleached from the hopeful pale green of spring to the burnt ochre of August. It was now just over seven months since returning from London, but in many ways I still felt as though I had just gotten back. Those seven months were filled with stress and very little of the exploration, travel or self-reflection that the fall had provided. There remained friends I had barely seen since returning and many tasks left undone.

August would mark a full year since the day when Ira drove me, a bit tearful, to the airport for a flight to the largely unknown. But I had been put into good hands and would be greeted on the other side of the US and the Atlantic Ocean by the incredible hospitality and warmth of my new English and Irish friends. At that point I only knew that what would follow would be an adventure, both physical, intellectual, and emotional, which would have a lasting impact on my life.

It was only appropriate that a year later, Ira and I would resurrect our newfound enthusiasm for exploration and be East Coast bound for a week-long vacation, beginning with a few days in New York City. Although I had grown up 40 miles outside The City, it had been a long time since we’d been acquainted and I realized I never knew her that well to begin with - only heading into the city as a teenager for concerts and trips to the Museum of Modern Art and not bothering with the major tourist attractions. So, I was excited to apply the curiosity and ambitious agenda-setting that I had engaged in abroad. It also quickly came to my realization that London was now my standard to which all other cities would be judged. And so Ira and I would spend a bit of time comparing the two trans-Atlantic global villages while strolling through the various New York neighborhoods and trying to pack in as much as two and a half days could hold in the glorious late summer weather.

We arrived in LaGuardia in the early evening and took a bus directly to the Upper West side to check into our hotel, freshen up, and drop off our bags. Now, finding a remotely affordable hotel in New York is a saga in and of itself, especially when one is booking a mere forty-eight hours in advance. We were thus pleasantly surprised to find our room clean, bright, and even equipped with air conditioning. The lack of an elevator was a small concession to make and I dare say we would even stay there again. We began our evening stroll with a walk over to the Dakota Building to pay homage to where John Lennon was shot (it appears that some kind of Beatle recognition may have become a theme in our travels since walking the zebra stripes on Abbey Road) and generally wondered what it would be like to live in such a grand building. We then hopped a bus down to Times Square to experience the hustle and bustle and the flashing lights as dusk began to fall. Onto to Greenwich Village where we covered Bleeker Street and Greenwich Street before retiring to a wee spot called Tea and Sympathy, complete with its own tea blend, posters with Cockney slang sayings, and run by ex-pat Brits who had adopted American style service. I ribbed Ira a bit; something about how we’d come all the way to New York to go to an English café, but this was before tasting the Shephard’s pie, which was the perfect comfort after a long day of traveling. Weary and ready for bed, we caught the wrong subway uptown and ended up waiting on a platform in Harlem for quite sometime before getting a train back down to our hotel, all of which was far less exciting than it might sound, I’m happy to report.