Day 2–Getting Lost, The Met, Lincoln and Mincemeat

by | May 3, 2026 | Uncategorized

This is my typical walk in NYC. Start one way, figure out it's the wrong way, go another way, no, that's the wrong way, and do it all over again.

Our day started with me walking. And as I write this on the morning of day 4, I can definitely say I have gotten older since the last time we were in NYC. I just can’t get my bearings. We have been here four times, and in the first three, I had no problem finding my way. Now I wander around like a lost child, looking for his mommy. Or my friend Mike and I wandering around Singapore pre-dawn. Yes, I could use a maps app on my phone, but I swear, when it says start route, I NEVER know which way to go. Supposedly, if I look at the little dot on the phone, it shows the direction I am going. But the buildings here seem to mess it up, and I will get half a block away before it tells me I have gone the wrong way. This morning I walked half an Avenue block (the long ones) before I realized I was going uptown instead of downtown, where I wanted to go. I know where I want to go; I just can’t seem to get my head in the right place. Check out this screenshot of my route. It’s nuts. I walk up a half a block, then back, then up the same block another way, then back and then a different block. The truly funny thing is that I get messed up when I go find these places in the morning but when we go out as a large or small group, everyone expects me to be the guide.

At any rate, Friday, after my walk, I went out and brought a small breakfast back to the room. We ate, then met the group for a "luxury motor coach" ride up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the way, we stopped at the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park for a quick walk and talk led by our excellent guide, Hardy. I need to say here that it would be really nice if Break-Away Tours invested in Whisper devices that let you plug the guide directly into your ear. With 41 of us in a crowded outdoor space, it is sometimes very difficult to hear the guides.

After our stop in Central Park, we continued uptown (I think ?) to the Met. It was PACKED! But we had a private tour arranged that lasted a little more than an hour. Our guide told us that seeing all the exhibits would take about three weeks' worth of 24-hour days, so he gave us a highlights tour of what he thought we might like to see. We saw Tiffany glass, African art, European portraiture, British sculpture, and Greek statuary. I have to say, our guide was very good. He shared things I had not heard before (I never took an art appreciation course) about the paintings. I truly enjoyed it. When he was done, he released us into the wilds of the museum to catch lunch (which we did) and then to wander for about an hour. At this point, Kathleen had walked more than she had in a long while, so I got her an Lyft (thanks for the freebie, Chase) and sent her back to the hotel for a nap while the rest of us moved on to tour Lincoln Center. I told Kathleen later that she made the right choice, as the Lincoln Center tour was the lowlight (so far) of our trip.

Our guide was new and didn’t know much. It was kind of sad. People would ask him questions, and he would say, “I will have to look that up for a future tour,” or “That wasn’t in our training.” Since we had split into three small groups, our group had just picked the short straw. We saw the other groups doing a lot more interesting things, and the reviews from those groups were great, but we just got the wrong guide.

After our tour at LC, we returned to the hotel for a brief rest before heading out to dinner on our own. Kathleen and I had made reservations for six or eight (depending on the night) at nearby restaurants. That night, we were dining with six other Trilogy friends at the famous Sardi’s in the heart of the theater district. This is where cast members (and a lot of famous people) come to have dinner or drinks post-show. Their walls are lined with signed (by the subject) framed caricature portraits. Some are easily recognizable, while others we had to go up to and read the signatures, and depending on how bad their handwriting was, we still don’t know who they are.

The food (like the previous night’s at Tony’s DiNapoli) was fine. I had lasagna because it hadn’t been part of the feast the night before. The menu leaned a little toward Italian cuisine, but there were other options. But you don’t go to Sardi’s for the food. You go for the history. It’s been there for 100 years. And it’s one of those places you need to go once. We did the same thing when we went to The Ivy in London two years ago, before a play in the West End. Good food, but you are there for the history.

After dinner, we walked about half a block to the theater to see Operation Mincemeat. It was quite the show. Five actors, 54 characters, about a thousand costume changes, some great songs (sung way too fast ?), some very poignant songs that brought a tear to my eye, and some hilarious laughs. Not my favorite show I have ever seen, but pretty darn good. And it’s based on a true story. Check out the description in my pre-trip post.

After the show, we were DONE! It was back to the hotel (thankfully only three blocks away) and bed. I was so tired I didn’t even bother to walk the next morning…which was OK since we walked a ton more the next day. More about that in my next post.

Photos are below. If my gallery module works, they will look good and work well. You can click them to enlarge. Hope it does. Sadly I can't figure out how to drop them between my paragraphs so today they are all at the end.

The fact that I even get in Broadway shows is, to me, still amazing, but then to win a Tony was just incredible.  —Jane Krakouski

We Make It To Broadway

by | May 2, 2026 | Uncategorized

Editor's Note: This will not be my best post ever due to some really ugly tech support problems that took more than an hour to fix. I want to get it online before we head out to breakfast. I promise to do better.

Micheal directing us to our "luxury motor coach"

This is going to be tough. Or as I told Kathleen last night, “I need a sea day.” We’ve had only one full day, and I’m exhausted. I don’t have a lot of time to write and process photos to get this out to all of you. I would give you the entire schedule for yesterday, but that’s for the next post. This one is just to tell you the story of getting there: our bus pickup, our flight, our “luxury motor coach” into Manhattan, and an amazing dinner at Tony’s DiNapoli with some great friends.

Thursday morning at 4:30 am, we gave Keeley her final kisses and pets (she is staying at home with Kathleen’s daughter Michelle), and we set off for Trilogy’s clubhouse, where we would be met by two 14-passenger Sprinter vans I had arranged. They would whisk 21 of us off to SeaTac International Airport. (A quick note for regular readers: I know I promised Kathleen that after arranging all those buses in Scotland pre-pandemic, I would never do that again… but these were vans, not buses ??).

To get this all to work out, we had to find a way to get to the Clubhouse (about half a mile away for us, but 3-4 miles for others—Trilogy is a big place) and not leave our car in Trilogy’s woefully inadequate parking lot for an entire week. Some people actually had friends who liked them enough to get up out of bed and drive them there at that ungodly hour. Others were going to leave our car in the lot, and friends would pick it up later in the day. We had planned to do this, but our friends who were going to do our pick up got called away, and we got really lucky when a friend who is on the trip with us and lives just five houses away from the clubhouse let us park our car in her garage. Her son had her car, so there was room in her immaculate and well-organized garage for our car. We can’t thank her enough.

I had told everyone the vans would be there at 4:30 and that we would leave without them at 4:50. So I dropped Kathleen off at the clubhouse, where we found a BUNCH of people already there before 4:30, loading the vans. We got our luggage into the van, and I drove the short distance to where we would leave the car, then walked back to check off everyone on my van list and make sure we had everyone who had signed up to go with us. The only problem was that when I got back, one of the vans I had left for the airport was gone, and I had no idea who was in it. At this point, it’s only 4:40, and our driver wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave anyone behind since I had said we would wait until 4:50. But he told me that the other van had 10 people and we had 11, so I told him to go ahead, hoping and praying that we were not leaving anyone. Thankfully, everyone had been right on time (or early), and we all got there, WHEW!

The airport was far better than we expected. Kathleen and I hadn’t flown since we went to Africa last July (we drove to our October cruise), and SeaTac had made outstanding improvements to its security lines. We were through and on our way to the Alaska Air FC lounge in no time, where we hung out until we were called (right on time) to board. The flight was smooth, and since we had left early, we arrived at JFK in NYC half an hour early. Of course, that meant there was still a plane at our gate, so we sat on the tarmac for 30 minutes. I wish they would figure this out. Why get us there early just to sit on the plane and wait? Eventually, we got off the plane and headed to baggage claim. Alaska Air had done a great job with all our luggage, and I am pretty sure not a single person in our group lost a suitcase.

JFK is a BIG airport, but when we had our bags, Mike (one of our superb guides from Break-Away tours) was waiting to meet us. He got us out and onto our “luxury motor coach,” and we were off into the city. With the traffic, it took us a little more than an hour to get to our Manhattan hotel, but another one of our excellent guides, Hardy, kept us entertained with outstanding information about our drive and NYC in general. Even though Kathleen and I have been here numerous times before, I learned a lot. He would be our main guide for the week, and we are still (after two days) thrilled to have him.

We are staying at the Westin Times Square. It’s a very nice hotel, just about a block from Times Square. But Break-Away uses it because we can walk just about anywhere. Once we arrived and got settled in, we all met in the lobby to walk to a wonderful Italian restaurant, We walked right through Times Square to get there and Tony’s Di Napoli. This place is an institution and has been around since the fifties (just like us ?). They serve you a LOT OF ITALIAN FOOD, and they serve it family style. They bring it to your table on huge platters, and you pass it around. It was just like grandma used to make. Not gourmet, but delicious. Top that off with a nice Chianti and cannoli for dessert, and it was a perfect way to start the trip.

I only had two tiny quibbles about Tony’s. We were seated in a basement dining room, and the lighting for taking photos was terrible, as you will see in my photos. Thankfully, there are only a few of them. I know I could have taken them with my phone and gotten slightly better results, but I wanted the actual feel of the room. The other thing that was a pain was the noise. This may have been the nosiest restaurant I have ever been in. It was a legacy building, and all the walls, ceilings, and floors were hard materials, which meant that with our party and about 50 other people down there, it was LOUD! You pretty much had to yell to be heard by the person sitting next to you, which only made the room EVEN LOUDER! But it was a delicious dinner, and no one left hungry for want of great food. It is almost sad how much we left on the serving platters. After dinner was over (around 10:30 NYC time), we took a short three-block walk back to the Westin and fell fast asleep.

Here are my photos of our the dinner at Tony's. As you can see, it was kinda dark down there. Don't forget, you can click them to enlarge them.

For our first time traveling with 41 people (we only had 21 in the vans—the rest had flown in early or arranged their own transportation to the airport), things were going very smoothly. More tomorrow about our first full day, which about killed us (in a good way). I should also mention that even though we regularly travel with two or four other people, traveling with 41 is really interesting in one big way. We know these folks from living in the same community, and we are all members of the Travel Club. But that doesn’t mean I know every name (because I am president and have a big mouth, they all know me ?). When we first moved into Trilogy, a neighbor who had known us before told us she had been on a Travel Club trip, and no one remembered her name to say good morning or good evening, or anything to her. I kind of vowed that this trip would not be that way for anyone. So I put together a PDF of photos of the entire group with names so I could remember who was who. Two days in, I am doing pretty well, and thankfully, Break-Away had some really great name tags for us, which really helps as well.

That's it for day 1. Yesterday was our first full day, and I hope I get a chance to write it up tomorrow. I certainly took lots more photos as we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, had dinner at Sardi's and saw an amazing Broadway show—Operation Mincemeat. See you then.

There's nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity.   —Sammy Davis, Jr.

 

Less than a week to go

by | Apr 26, 2026 | Uncategorized

Our home-away-from-home in NYC, the Westin Times Square

We are almost off to NYC. Our home base will be the Westin Times Square, which is less than three blocks from all four theaters we will be attending, as well as most restaurants and many tour destinations. So I just thought I would give you a quick update on everything we are doing. Tours, shows, restaurants and all the other stuff you do when you are taking a “Broadway Tour.” (It also gives me a chance to send out one more post to make sure everything is working here on the website before we go.) As I mentioned in my last post, we will be seeing three musicals and one straight play. For those of you who don’t know what a “straight play” is, that means it’s a drama or comedy that’s not a musical. Here are the shows we are seeing:

The Plays

I had seen an article in the New York Times about all the plays currently on Broadway, but I somehow lost it. Thankfully, Kathleen (the master of the internet) found it for me again. Since the NY Times is behind a paywall, I grabbed their blurbs about our four plays, and here they are. Keep in mind that the links to the reviews are behind the same paywall, so you won’t be able to read them without an NYT subscription. But you can click the play’s title to see its page.

Maybe Happy Ending

This is the show that tiptoed onto Broadway and quietly took the 2025 Tony for best musical. Robot neighbors in Seoul, nearing obsolescence, tumble into odd-couple friendship in this wistfully romantic charmer of a musical comedy by Will Aronson and Hue Park, starring Darren Criss (through May 17), a Tony winner for his performance, and Hannah Kevitt. With Tony-winning direction by Michael Arden (“Parade”). (At the Belasco Theater.) Read the review.

Operation Mincemeat

A sneaky compassion lies at the heart of this caper of a show, a deliciously eccentric London import that won the 2024 Olivier Award for best new musical. Now with an American ensemble, it’s a riff on a bizarre true story from World War II, when British Intelligence, keen to misdirect the Germans, dressed up a dead man as a Royal Marine major, planted a fake invasion plan on him and dropped him in the sea for the enemy to find. Beware the emotional ambush hiding inside its poignant standout number “Dear Bill,” sung by a proper, middle-aged secretary who has been through war before. (At the Golden Theater.) Read the review.

Oh, Mary!

Channeling the deliriously outrageous, emphatically queer downtown spirit of Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, this arch comedy by Cole Escola (“Difficult People”) was a fizzy Off Broadway hit. The title character is a sozzled, stage-struck Mary Todd Lincoln— a very loose cannon largely ignored by her husband, the president (John-Andrew Morrison), who is occupied with assorted sexual exploits and the bothersome Civil War. Maya Rudolph (from SNL, Loot and more) plays the teacher he hires for Mary. Maya Rudolph makes her Broadway debut in the title role from April 28 through June 20. Sam Pinkleton, a Tony winner for this production, directs. (At the Lyceum Theater.) Read the review.

& Juliet

With a song list full of pop hits, this frolicsome musical comedy imagines — with an assist from Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife — what happens when Juliet goes on living sans her Romeo. (At the Stephen Sondheim Theater.) Read the review.

The Food

I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention the food. We have three group dinners and one breakfast included. Break-Away is taking us to Tony’s di Napoli, Marseille, and Bond 45NY. Since our three other dinners are on our own and right before our plays, and some are on Friday and Saturday night, we wanted to make sure we had reservations for those nights. We are eating at the world-famous Sardi’s, a tapas place called Boqueria, and a Greek place on another night called Kellari. We have rounded up some friends and friends of friends to join us at dinners. You will, of course, have complete reports on all of them.

Lots of places to go and lots of things to see!

Tours

Besides the plays, we have numerous tours scheduled for us by Break-Away Tours, the travel company that is taking us to NYC. These include tours of Carnegie Hall, the Top of the Rock, Radio City Music Hall, a private tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tour of Lincoln Center and a theater workshop with someone (director, writer, actor) from one of the plays we are seeing. All that, along with a harbor cruise, the 911 Museum, the Museum of Broadway, Whew, I am tired already, and we haven’t even left yet.

I think that about covers it. Expect posts starting on Friday morning from the Westin Times Square, our home for those six nights. We can’t wait.

There’s no place that communicates as much – and as quickly – as Times Square does. — Jan Vogler

We are going to BROADWAY!

by | Apr 18, 2026 | Uncategorized

Fom a recent trip (2024) to NYC. This was a two day stop off the Oceania Vista. Our trip this time will be six nights in a hotel in Times Square

We are back to traveling! YEAH!!! In less than two weeks, Kathleen and I will get up really early (4:00 am) and meet 26 other Trilogy residents at our clubhouse for a ride to SeaTac Airport, where we will all board Alaska Air flight 34 nonstop to the Big Apple.

I know this sounds very different from our usual trips. For one thing, we don’t usually travel with 41 people, but we will this time. If you are a regular reader, you know that we live in a 55+ community called Trilogy on Redmond Ridge in Washington State. Our community has an active Travel Club, and I happen to be its president. One of the things the Travel Club does is offer quarterly trips for members. In the 20+ years the Trilogy Travel Club has existed, it has traveled to every continent except Antarctica, visited more than 50 countries, and traveled all over the US.

I joined almost as soon as we moved four years ago and was asked to join the board and take over as Vice President and Communications Director in my first year. I became president the second year and have been ever since. I tell you all this because, in that time, there have been more than 12 Travel Club trips, and we have been on exactly NONE OF THEM!

So we decided we needed to join one, and along came a theater tour to New York City. Two of our members participated in a theater tour sponsored by a local theater group and LOVED it. They thought it would make a great trip to offer to the club. So we contacted Alex at Break-Away Tours, who had led the theater tour they went on, and started setting this up.

To get a little deeper into why this trip will be special for the Club,I need to let you know that up until the pandemic, the Club trips had a very high rate of participation. Usually, the Club’s trips and tours would have 20-30 members (out of our total of 450 members) traveling on them. Since the pandemic, it has been hard to get back to those numbers. Our norm right now is somewhere around eight people. Sometimes as few as four. We have started working with tour companies who don’t have minimums for tours because they will do a tour with 16 people and combine our eight with four from somewhere else and four more from another place. It’s great but not what used to happen.

On this theater tour, we (the Travel Club Board) decided to roll the dice and do a private tour with a minimum number of people required, or the tour would not go. Break-Away only does private tours, so we had to have at least 20 going. To be honest, when we rolled out the trip, I wasn’t sure it would go. Getting 21 people to want to travel that far and spend that much was a distant memory in our Club’s history.

But lo and behold, three days after we put the trip on sale, we were sold out with 41 people headed to Broadway. In fact, up until our final payment date on Valentine’s Day, we had a waiting list of 8 more people who, sadly, won’t be joining us.

So that’s why, a week from Thursday, Kathleen and I will get up early, board a “luxury motor coach” I have arranged, and take off on a Broadway adventure. We will be in NYC for 7 days/6 nights, leaving on April 30 and returning home on May 6.

The trip itself looks to be amazing. We have tickets for three Broadway musicals and one straight play, lots of different tours, six nights at the Westin Times Square (where we can walk to every theater in less than 10 minutes) and a bunch more that I will detail between now and when we leave.

Needless to say, we have never done a tour like this. Most people we have ever traveled with were on our Martini Mates reunion cruise to Alaska in 2017, when we had 17 people on Celebrity’s Solstice. This will definitely be an adventure, and I will be detailing it all here on our blog. If you want to follow along, make sure to sign up to be notified when I post.

Broadway is a main artery of New York life – the hardened artery.   —Walter Winchell

Finally Back!

by | Mar 14, 2026 | Uncategorized

It certainly has been a while, but I think, hope and pray that I am back posting on my own website. The transition from WordPress.com to plain old WordPress on my BlueHost server has been interesting, frustrating and sometimes downright horrid, but I think it is on the way to becoming the site I want it to be and that I hope you will like. There are still a few things we are working on, but once I found a new software solution called Divi, things got better. Mostly due to their amazing tech support from a (sorry to type this) AI named Fin (Divi is made in Finland, thus Fin).

I know we're not supposed to love AIs, but I believe that helping with tech support is one of their best functions. One of the things I dislike most about human tech support via chat or voice is that if you don't understand something on the first try, they start thinking, "This guy must be really dumb." When you ask them for the third or fourth time how to do something, they really seem to think you are a total moron. I don't usually have to ask three times, but sometimes, when learning an entirely new way to do something, it takes that many repetitions. And human tech support, being paid by the hour and the number of people they assist, truly just wants people like me to go away so they can go on with answering calls and helping people with a computer IQ over 10.

An AI, on the other hand, doesn't care how many times you ask it a question. It will review the problem with you, again and again. And its AI is great at that. It even tells me it understands how frustrating it is to try to work through something and think it works, only for it to revert to the problem when you go back to it an hour later. Believe me, that has happened to me. And that's when I start to scream, cry, or both. Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife who puts up with me and an amazing dog who knows when I am stressed and gives me as many snuggles and kisses as I can handle when things go wrong. And in this journey to start the year, lots of things have gone wrong. Again and again and again.

Which brings us to here. My "new" website. Please take a minute to look around and let me know if you find anything that needs attention. I have had Kathleen and my buddy Bob looking at it this week and I think I have fixed most of the things they mentioned to me and the other thing is what Divi's tech support is working on.

It is pretty much the same content as before (other than this post), but in some ways a better design and in some ways worse. For instance, do you remember all those cool galleries that you could click and turn into slide shows of my photos? Well, it took me forever to figure out how to get those to work in the new format. But as you will see below, I have recreated it. Now I just have to figure out how to make the captions bigger and more readable when you click on the photo to see it. But that also means that if you look at past posts, those galleries are gone, replaced with just thumbnails of my photos that you have to click twice to see. For them to look like they used to, I would have to go back and change each one individually. As much as I love you, my readers, that's not going to happen. 

So, as my first post on the new site (we haven't really been traveling), I wanted to update you on what we've been doing in the first 2.5 months of 2026. 

January was all about the usual stuff. Seriously, for some reason, January always feels like a boring month. I just looked back at our calendar, and the most exciting thing that happened was that our dishwasher broke and was out of commission for nearly the entire month until the warranty company agreed to pay for the repair. 

But February was a bit busier. I went down to Olympia a couple of times to see the kids. I saw Maylee in a play (Frozen) and attended a basketball game where Mason's high school band was performing. I also met his girlfriend, Kyleigh (who is amazing), and caught up with the Olympia group in Gig Harbor to celebrate Mason's 15th birthday by playing Laser Tag (I LOVE LASER TAG–photo below). 

At the start of March, we both traveled to Olympia proudly to be there when our son-in-law, Joel, was promoted to Lieutenant in the Washington State Patrol. This is a pretty big deal, and there is a picture below. I would have added these photos here, but I wanted to make sure the gallery/slide show module worked correctly, so that's why you get to see them. 

The other three photos in the gallery are from walks I took this month, along with a photo I snapped outside our front door yesterday (March 13). Yes, we had snow on March 13, which isn't supposed to happen in Western Washington. We compared the weather with my brother and sister-in-law in Southern California, and they were unseasonably hot (mid-80s), while we were getting snow. Of course, the current regime running our government claims there is no such thing as climate change, so we know we will be OK. 

My next post will return to travel topics as I share details about our upcoming trips. We have three planned between now and the end of June. Stay tuned. Don't forget to let me know if you see any issues by commenting below. That will also help me verify that comments are working.

To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not the obstacles.  — T.F. Hodge