Well,
after helping Harrison’s painter friend Ben with his artwork , for
which Ben didn’t seem very grateful, we got on the AMTRAK train and went
down to New York City for the weekend….Ben woke me up when the train
arrived and said” get up Stan, we are in Manhattan “… I thought we were
going to New York City…Ben said that New York is made up of 5 big
neighborhoods called Boroughs…Manhattan , where we arrived, is one of
the five boroughs and is on an island…how cool is that…the morning in
the city was not so great because Ben left me in the envelope but in the
afternoon we went over to Brooklyn on a taxi boat…Ben says that
Brooklyn is one of the neighborhoods of New York City but it sure looked
bigger than a neighborhood to me….we got on the boat taxi near the
southern tip of Manhattan , a place called Battery Park…there is an old
fort there from the Revolutionary War….as the boat left for Brooklyn we
got a great view of the Statue of Liberty…it is a big green woman
holding up a torch over her head….Ben says it was a gift from the people
in France and welcomes visitors and immigrants to the United
States….Ben says almost all Americans have relatives who were immigrants
and many of them saw this green lady the first thing when they got
here…she really is big, the people below her are so small…
When we got to BROOKLYN I got put back in the
envelope while Ben visited a friend….but on the way back to Manhattan we
didn’t take the boat or the subway, but we walked , well Ben did…I rode
in his pocket…the bridge was called the Williamsburg Bridge…the bridge
is over the East River, one of the two rivers which make Manhattan an
island…the other river is called the Hudson according to Ben. Ben said there was a special reason we took this bridge…as
we were approaching the Manhattan side of the bridge, Ben told me to
look to the south…he said that Harrison used to live on the 10 th floor
of the big brick building below us…so cool…he used to have this same
view from his bedroom that we had from the bridge…there was a park
across the street from his building and it was beside the river where
boats come and go all day…I was getting tired so Ben put me back in the
envelope after taking a few photos…I don’t remember anything else…
This Friday
afternoon we are going to get on a plane and fly across the entire
United States to a town on the Pacific coast called Portland in the
state called Oregon …( there is another ocean on the other side of the
country Ben says is called the Pacific )…so that’s it for now…news
coming soon from Portland…Stanley
