Dan goes to New York

 Friday, September 20.

I’m at the Newark airport train station. There are four platforms and about eight tracks.     I just took a picture of New Jersey transit with a Pennsylvania heritage colour scheme on the engine.   I have a round-trip ticket to Penn Station.

Just saw my first Acela.   Amtrak’s higher-speed train in the Northeast corridor.   It did not stop at the Newark airport. It was on an inside track.

New Jersey transit train 3934.  You can ride trains all day long from Trenton New Jersey to New York City.  This is a bi-level car and I have a round-trip ticket.  

The ticket machine for Long Island Railroad wanted a pin for my credit card! I’ve never used a pin for my credit card so I ended up paying cash. I now have a pocket full of coins. I am taking Long Island Railroad to Jamaica and then I will take a bus to Donald Trump’s boyhood home .

Penn Station is humongous! I got off the Jersey transit, passed several other things to find the LIRR.  

There’s a stadium outside the Forest Hills station that looks like a lot of tennis courts and all the buildings around look like big English castle 

Some of the trains are so long that they won’t fit the train platform at some of the smaller stations. They come on the PA system and advise you to move forward if you want to get off.  I guess ridership is up if they have increased the length of their trains.

There is an ad on the train for heating oil     I can order it from my seat.     I live in Texas, what is heating oil?  Just kidding, I used to buy it when I lived in Germany.

Just boarded the Q30 bus.  when I got my round-trip bus ticket train ticket the machine gave me a card for the subway/bus.  Got on the bus. I saw that this Queens neighborhood is so densely populated the construction workers have to push sacrete on a cart across the street to do their work.    In Houston, they just back a cement truck up to the site, but there was no room on the street where I was.    

The book that I am using to find all of these presidential homes is called The Pesidential Libraries Bucket Journal.    It tells me that Donald Trump’s boyhood home is at 8515 Wareham Pl. in Queens.   I found a two-story cottage that was sitting empty and had eviction notices on the door. The lawn is a Mess.   There is even a yard sign that says "Do Not Take Kittens."  There are no signs or plaques that say this was ever part of the Trump family.    The rest of the neighborhood is very nice.    

Got back to the Long Island railroad station to find that I had missed the Oyster Bay train by a few minutes, so I walked down the street just a little bit to a local pizza and empanada place where they baked a fresh slice of veggie pizza for me.   Delicious.  

Got off the train at Oyster Bay and called an Uber to take me to the Roosevelt house at Sagamore Hill.    Things got crazy.  I left my phone in the Uber and spent the next several hours trying to fix the problem.     One of the other visitors to Teddy Roosevelt‘s house found the trouble number for Uber and passed his phone to me where we played tag with David, the driver for over an hour.   In the meantime, we took the tour of the house.     Teddy Roosevelt built this house on top of Sagamore Hill and raised six children in it. The house is full of mementos of his world travels to include stuffed animals and animal pelts all over the floor.    Our tour guide, Sara, was extremely knowledgeable and was able to answer all questions that were asked by the two children in our group. These children were asking about some of the most obscure things in the house and Sara knew about all of them.    While I was waiting for David to pick me back up with my now found phone, I went to the visitor center and learned more about Theodore Roosevelt, and bought a lot of souvenirs at the gift shop.    I knew that Teddy had won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a piece between the Russians and the Japanese, and I knew that he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his exploits in Cuba, but did not realize the reason why the army did not see fit to award him this metal Until President Clinton awarded it to the family many years later.   Seems that Mr. Roosevelt drafted a letter to the army complaining that his rough riders were dying of malaria in Cuba long after the battle was over and that it was time to bring the boys home.    The army did not like it when he sent the letter to the press.   So it took a long time before he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

He and his family led very active lives.     When I went to buy my coffee mug, which I do for every president, the lady at the gift shop pointed out that I needed to buy Rough Rider Coffee since he drank about a gallon of it every day.   I also bought two books and my customary refrigerator magnet.   

Coming home, I rode a very quiet train as far as Jamaica.    My other trains had been quiet.  But the train in Jamaica, heading for Penn Station, on a Friday night, was anything but quiet! I am pretty sure that I sat in the middle of a bachelorette party all the way to Manhattan! It was wild! You will have to take my word for it as I was afraid to pull my camera out because I knew they would kill me!   There are things that I am smart enough to leave alone!

Tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll be heading to the Franklin Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.