Klaus Nordby's Militantly Dull Homepage:

October 31, 2008

Our great New York and New England Vacation, page 2

OK, here are some more USA photos and stories. (See the previous USA 2008 page here.)

"Thursday in the Park with Harald." Amazingly, there are several million Manhattanites all around us here, on an island only 60 km² large (Oslo county is 454 km², though that includes a lot of unhinhabited forest areas). This photo was taken in-between our strolling from the Frick Collection up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (I'm not at all happy with the tones and colors and joins of this panorama image, but I'm putting it up prematurely just to show one more glimpse of Central Park in autumn.) Google-map this photo's exact location.

At the great sculptur Daniel Chester French's magnificient summer estate Chesterwood in eastern Massachusetts we toured his home and studio, and encountered a reminder of the esthetic nihilism of our age when our tour guide brazenly pushed this heap of twirled, junked iron beams as "sculpture". I loudly proclaimed to the whole tour group that the definition of art had not just "changed" since French's time, as the tour guide said — but that it had disintegrated.

The Daniel Chester French residence. The place was swarming with old tourists, so I took 6 photos and merged them in Photoshop in such a way that all the little old ladies vanished.

Ah, New Hampshire in the fall — one of my favorite places on earth. It's Maxfield Parrish country, for sure, who lived most of his life an hour or two from the Lake Winnepesauke area. Google-map this photo's exact location.

The same spot as above, but with slightly different lighting. It's not love which makes the world go round, but light! Google-map this photo's exact location.

That's right, I'm a sucker for lakes and ponds.

"Stairway to Heaven." In NYC, things go only up, up, up.

Harald, here having some trouble focusing on the menu (probably due to the stream of radical ideas emitted by Lee Pierson across him) in one of my favorite NYC dining places, Hudson Place in Murray Hill, the neighborhood where I lived during my NYC stay in 1997-98 — and where Ayn Rand lived for the last 20+ years of her life.

The Wells beach, on the southern coast of Maine. In the course of an hour or so, around sunset, I took a great deal of shots here, which I think will, after dozens of hours of heavy lifting with half a dozen computer programs, turn into the best photos from this trip. But I'm waiting for the next version of Photoshop to be available to me, sometime later in November, as it has many new features which will ease my gargantuan megapixel labors. Google-map this photo's exact location.

Harald doesn't drive, so I did all the driving on our trip — about 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) in nine days. I had rented the RV for 1,500 miles, so that worked out fine. We both got a common cold in NYC, which did slightly impair our vacationing in that we had to take various medications and sleep a bit more than we'd have done if our health had been perfect, but our coughing and sniffing didn't impact our New England vacation to any significant extent. It was a great, great trip! Google-map this photo's exact location.