Belfast Bound

Lunch with two more Vanguard friends today then the long trek north. I caught an Amtrak train at 1:30 pm in Paoli, Penn. Then I hot footed it from Penn Station to Grand Central Station to catch another train north to Beacon, N.Y. Google said it would take 24 minutes to walk from 31st Street and 7th Avenue to 42nd Street and Park Avenue, 11 short blocks and four very long blocks. I allowed one and a quarter hours between trains, expecting to have difficulty finding the right track at Grand Central and activating my MTA e-ticket on my phone (indeed I needed help doing this).
During my walk, I paused long enough to snap a building with a European Union flag, maybe an embassy.

And another snap of Grand Central in the distance.

I was so efficient that I had time to go to the bathroom at Grand Central, buy a baba ganouj-filled pita, and catch a Hudson Line train a half hour before my expected departure. This allowed me to catch the $1 shuttle bus from Beacon to the airport in Stewart, instead of a $30 Uber, which I had planned to take from the later train.
I had stressed about this leg of the trip from the time I decided to book a flight to Stewart. I still struggle to correctly connect to wifi (I’m learning it’s a two-step process, including waiting for a permissions page to load, which may or may not happen quickly, or at all). I still don’t get how to be sure I can access the ticket if I’ve lost wifi. Apparently I need to learn how to do screen capture.
It’s a brave new world out there. I was at Stewart Airport something ridiculous like four hours early, but that was OK because I continued doing quarterly performance reporting that I had worked on the past two mornings.
The view from the train was one of unremitting urban decay from the Main Line to upstate New York. North Philly and Harlem were the worst, but the whole way I was struck by the sad state of low-income housing. I don’t know how people survive in such a bleak, densely built environment. The one redeeming feature of the trip was when the Hudson River was on one side of the tracks, offering a view to the cliffs and rounded hills on the Jersey side.
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