{"id":1500,"date":"2017-02-12T10:55:12","date_gmt":"2017-02-12T15:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/?p=1500"},"modified":"2020-06-24T20:09:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-25T00:09:34","slug":"neil-gaiman-in-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/?p=1500","title":{"rendered":"Neil Gaiman in NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meghan gave me an awesome Christmas present: tickets to see Neil Gaiman read from his latest book, Norse Mythology<\/a> at The Town Hall<\/a> on February 9, 2017 in New York City.\u00a0 She only purchased two tickets and it’s a Thursday night.\u00a0 Too bad kids \u2014 you’re staying home!\u00a0 (We arranged for our neighbor’s adult daughter Sam to stay with the girls for the night).<\/p>\n

\"lookingAs the day approached I watched the weather forecasts with growing interest.\u00a0 Snow was forecast for Thursday, the day of the event and the day we planned to travel to NYC.\u00a0 By Tuesday the forecast was clear: snow, and possibly a blizzard.\u00a0 Driving to NYC was out of the question, and flying would be problematic as well.\u00a0 We have easy access to trains, though, assuming they would run in a blizzard.<\/p>\n

The storm could not wait to arrive and it was snowing hard by the time we left the house for our local train stop.\u00a0 In order to head south on Amtrak, we take commuter rail from our house to Boston’s North Station, the subway (or walk when the weather is nice, which is to say not this time) from North Station to South Station, and pick up Amtrak there.\u00a0 The Amtrak train was scheduled to depart at 11:15, so we left the house by 9 am to catch everything on time.\u00a0 As usual, we forgot a few minor things like toothbrushes, and had to purchase them when we got there.<\/p>\n

\"pink<\/a>
We watched people skating at the park for a while, until the pink unicorns came out — then it was time to leave.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Amazingly enough, train service ran perfectly despite being a real, legitimate, certified blizzard.\u00a0 We had periods where we could not see the landscape at all, but the train continued to rock along at 100+ mph (verified via Waze on Meghan’s phone).\u00a0 The ride from South Station to Penn Station is about 4 \u00bd hours.<\/p>\n

By the time we got to NYC the snow had wound down, though it continued to snow back home for another six hours.\u00a0 The streets were messy and wet, with snow piled up at every corner.\u00a0 The hotel<\/a> is only a few blocks from Penn Station, a few blocks from Times Square, and a few blocks from The Town Hall \u2014 NYC is great that way.<\/p>\n

\"meghan
I still wonder what she’s thinking here<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We ate dinner around the corner from our hotel at the Beer Authority<\/a>. The food was yummy, the beer selection is well-curated, and we had a very enjoyable time.\u00a0 (I thoroughly enjoyed a Founders Porter<\/a> and Meghan tried a Timmerman’s Strawberry Lambic that was surprisingly tasty.)<\/p>\n

\"top
We popped out of the hotel, went around the corner, and had a (relatively) great view of the Empire State Building<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We killed a little more time before the show by wandering the local neighborhood.\u00a0 Times Square is always blindingly bright, but within a few blocks are much nicer views.<\/p>\n

Finally, the main event: Neil Gaiman.\u00a0 “Norse Mythology” was finished some time before the 2016 election, and every story in it is a faithful retelling of stories from the original eddas<\/a>, but the story he chose to read was eerily appropriate: a book about the gods building a wall around Asgard<\/a> to keep the ice giants out.\u00a0\u00a0 The reading was followed by a pair of previews, one for the American Gods miniseries<\/a> (based on his excellent book), and one for a movie adaptation of an old story of his, How to Talk to Girls at Parties<\/a>.\u00a0 Finally, he came back out with Ophira Eisenberg for a Q&A session.\u00a0 Mr. Gaiman is, by turns, very thoughtful and very funny.\u00a0 Despite the cramped seats made for midgets with abnormally short legs we really enjoyed ourselves.<\/p>\n

\"Neil
Neil Gaiman. He read a segment from his latest book, Norse Mythology, about building a wall around Asgard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The next morning we ate breakfast at the hotel and killed some more time waiting for our 11 am train.\u00a0 We visited the Empire State Building’s lobby and checked out a few adjoining blocks.\u00a0 Our train was delayed for nearly an hour due to “missing equipment”, but we got back to Boston by dark and back to our car by 6 pm.\u00a0 (Rush hour on the subway is never fun, but all in all it wasn’t too bad.)\u00a0 Glad to be home!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meghan gave me an awesome Christmas present: tickets to see Neil Gaiman read from his latest book, Norse Mythology at The Town Hall on February 9, 2017 in New York City.\u00a0 She only purchased two tickets and it’s a Thursday night.\u00a0 Too bad kids \u2014 you’re staying home!\u00a0 (We arranged for our neighbor’s adult daughter … Continue reading “Neil Gaiman in NYC”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[325,326,330,327,265,115,80,329,328,164],"class_list":["post-1500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-amtrak","tag-neil-gaiman","tag-no-kids","tag-norse-mythology","tag-nyc","tag-review","tag-snow","tag-the-town-hall","tag-trains","tag-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4o3FW-oc","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1500"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1503,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions\/1503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}