Fort Lee, NJ

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We spend some time along the retreat route.

Fort Lee, NJ is a town on the Palisades of the Hudson River. It’s known primarily for two things: the George Washington Bridge crosses the river at Fort Lee to the upper end of Manhattan island and George Washington’s retreat route runs right through it.

Of course, there was a fort. It sits high on the Palisades, just south of the bridge. There isn’t much left of it, but there is a nice park with paved paths and lookout points with benches. The Americans used the fort to lob mortars onto British ships sailing up and down the river.

Until the Americans ran away.

I’m making fun, of course. Back in those days of the Revolution, the American army did a lot of retreating. What’s weird is that there are signs along the retreat route proudly proclaiming that they ran away right past where the sign now stands. But we did win.

We had some time to kill before meeting my sister and brother and some others for dim sum, so we went for a walk in the park. And we got a few treats.

Fife and DrumThe first treat was the re-enactment stuff going on. I don’t know if they do this every Sunday or if we just happened to stop by on the right day, but there were men in revolutionary war uniforms doing the kinds of things the soldiers did back then. Like marching around with a drum and fife. Or with guns. Or setting up a camp near the mortar lobbing area. Or building a shelter without any modern tools.

camp I don’t know why these guys were there, but they were definitely into it. Their outfits looked great — but a lot cleaner than they would have been 230 years ago. Sadly, there weren’t many spectators. The park was pretty empty. It was as if they were performing for themselves. Maybe something was going to start later on. We didn’t hang around. We had dim sum to eat.

George Washington BridgeWe also spent some time at one of the lookouts, watching the bridge and the river flowing beneath it. I took some pictures (of course). And I can recall some of the facts that I’d read about the bridge while in my hotel room.

The George Washington Bridge — or GWB, to the locals — was once the longest single span suspension bridge in the world. It’s still one of the 15 longest. (It’s about 2 miles across the river.) It was built in the 1930s and was originally designed with two levels of roadway, but budget cuts kept the bridge to just the upper level until the early 1960s when the lower level was added. It’s the primary crossing from New Jersey to New York — I can’t remember how many millions of vehicles cross each day. The bridge’s original design called for the towers to be faced with local stone so it matched the Palisades on the New Jersey side. That plan was nixed along the way and the bridge is painted regularly. They just finished doing some rennovation on the towers — you can still see some of the scaffolding on the New York side in this photo.

When I was a kid, my family had a small motor boat. We kept it at home, on a trailer. We’d go boating in the Hudson River. The boat ramp we used is just south of the tower on the New Jersey side. We’d go on day trips around Manhattan island or past Ellis Island (before they fixed it up) and the Statue of Liberty. The water in New York Harbor was always rough; the water in the Harlem River was always smooth. Hells Gate, where the rivers came together with the Long Island Sound, was a crapshoot.

Leaves and SkyAnyway, I also took some time to lay back on the bench and look up at the sky through the leaves of an oak tree. It was nice to be among trees that were a good deal taller than I am. The area is lush with vegetation, like a jungle waiting to reclaim the land.

And just beyond it is I-95 with traffic and exhaust and the sound of cars and trucks.

We left the park right around noon and headed into town. Fort Lee (or Fort Ree, as we sometimes call it) is known for another thing: good Asian food. With a huge Chinese, Japanese, and mostly Korean population, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Want some of the best dim sum in the New York metro area? Go to Silver Pond on Main Street in Fort Lee. You won’t be disappointed.

And if you have time, check out the Fort Lee Historic Park. Maybe those guys will be camped out again.

The Lost Truck

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I take two guys up to find a misplaced pickup truck.

The call came mid-morning on Tuesday, just as I was preparing to take Zero-Mike-Lima down to Mesa for scheduled maintenance. The woman told me that her son and father were out in the desert looking for her son’s pickup truck. He’d parked it somewhere on Sunday before dawn, left it for some coyote hunting, and couldn’t find it in the morning.

One thing led to another. The son and his grandfather showed up at the airport. I gave them a safety briefing and loaded them on board the helicopter. A while later, we were heading out to the triangle of land between routes 89, 93, and 71, just north of Wickenburg.

Normally, I can spot just about anything larger than a washing machine from the air — especially if it’s a color other than desert beige. The truck had a crew cab and was pewter — about as close to desert beige as you can get. But it was a truck. A shiny, four-month-old truck. And that triangle of land isn’t that big.

I started by following the son’s directions to where he thought he’d come in from route 93. No luck. He claimed he’d parked near a corral. There were about a dozen cattle tanks in the area, each with its own bit of fencing that could be considered a corral. We flew over and around each one. Nothing.

I then went into a standard search pattern grid. Back and forth across the desert, moving northeast to southwest. Nothing.

“It must have been stolen,” the son said. “I can’t believe it. I left the windows open a crack. I guess someone must have found it and taken it.”

I found it hard to believe. It’s not as if there are car thieves hanging out in the desert, waiting for a hunter to park a brand new, $38,000 truck and walk away.

But the truck just wasn’t there.

I climbed about 1,000 feet for a final look. The entire area was spread out beneath us. No luck.

I headed back to Wickenburg. I wrote up a statement they could show the police to prove they’d looked hard for the truck. I cut them a good deal on the flight time, feeling sorry for them.

This morning, I called the mom to collect my fee via a credit card. I told her how sorry I was that we hadn’t found the truck. She told me that they’d found it afterward. It was by a hill. She didn’t have all the details.

I got the credit card info and hung up.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since. There was only one hill in that entire area. We circled it and flew all around it. It’s not as if it’s a forest out there, with big trees to hide something the size of a truck. If it were out there, we would have seen it.

Which leaves me to wonder whether he had me looking in the right area after all.

I guess I’ll never know for sure.

Ground Zero, In Passing

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I finally pass by an area I’d been avoiding.

We passed by Ground Zero in New York City the other day while going to the movies. I’d been avoiding lower Manhattan — something that’s pretty easy to do when you live 2,400 miles away and visit New York infrequently — since the World Trade Center’s twin towers disappeared from the skyline.

Ground ZeroBut Sunday I was there.

It’s amazing how much you can see of the area with the buildings gone. I could see Trinity Church and the old Woolworth Building (the tallest building in the world for 13 years, topped by the Chrysler Building and later the Empire State Building in 1934). We were on the west side of Ground Zero; evidently, the tourist stuff is on the east side. From our view, it just looked like a big construction site. Very big — four city blocks. Of course, I didn’t get a picture of it from the theater’s windows; the shot here is from the car.

I feel kind of weird about the way Ground Zero is being treated as a tourist attraction. I hope most people are very respectful to the site in remembrance of the thousands who died there. I don’t think that people who don’t know New York can understand the significance of the attack and buildings’ collapse. Lower Manhattan is occupied by literally hundreds of thousands of people on a typical workday morning. Those buildings were each 1/4 mile tall. If they had fallen any way but straight down, the body count and damage to New York would have been far, far worse. Any New Yorker can tell you how lucky the city is that the buildings came almost straight down. And any New Yorker who was in lower Manhattan that day can tell you, without exaggeration, how lucky they are to be alive.

The DaVinci Code — The Movie

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Worse than the book?

That’s what the review on Slate said: the movie was worse than the book. I didn’t believe it.

Silly me.

I also poo-pooed Mike’s cousin Ricky, who didn’t want to see the movie because it had only gotten 1-1/2 stars. (I don’t know where he saw that rating.) It couldn’t be that bad, I argued. I’d seen a positive review just that morning on a network news show in our hotel room.

Ricky was stuck with us — he missed his flight on Sunday morning and called us to rescue him from the airport. We dragged him to dim sum in Fort Lee and around New York’s SoHo and south Village — which he seemed to enjoy — and then to the Battery Park Regency 11 Theater for the movie.

A few weird things about this particular theater. First of all, it’s on the 5th (or so) floor of the building. You buy your ticket at street level, then proceed up a series of escalators, one of which takes you at least two floors up. The escalators run along the east side of the building where windows look out — right at Ground Zero. (More on that in another post.)

The movie was boring. It seemed to follow the book pretty closely — I read the book about two years ago, so I don’t remember it perfectly well. What’s weird about the movie is that the book is so widely read that you’d expect everyone in the theater to know the punchline — that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who bore his child after the crucifixion. Yet that punchline wasn’t delivered until more than halfway through the movie. I guess it makes sense because it was probably delivered halfway through the book, too. But when the information was presented in the movie, I felt like saying, “Yeah, and…?” As if there should be more. But there wasn’t.

I think Tom Hanks’s acting capabilities were completely wasted on this movie. There wasn’t much real acting to do. Just deliver the same lines that were in the book — poor dialog to begin with. There was an awful lot of tell rather than show. In the scenes in Teabing’s house, it appeared that Hanks’s character already knew much of what Teabing told Sophie — if that was the case, why didn’t he just tell her before? Of course, this is a book complaint — not a movie complaint — because the movie followed the book. I guess if you make a movie that closely follows a bad book, you’ll end up with a bad movie.

The guy who played Teabing — who also played the bad guy in at least one X-Men movie — did a much better acting job. But I think that’s because his character wasn’t flat and lifeless like the other characters in the book.

Flashbacks were distracting and overused, especially the historic ones. It was like watching a History Channel documentary. You know the kind. Where they get actors to re-enact scenes from history?

I left the movie feeling as if I’d gained nothing from the experience of seeing it.

Ricky said the movie’s music was overpowering. He said that was a sign of a bad movie. I liked the soundtrack, but agree that it sometimes did more work than it should have.

But I wasn’t impressed with the movie at all. It was just a visual representation of what was in the book. And since what was in the book wasn’t anything that needed to be visualized, the movie wasn’t anything special.

Did you see The DaVinci Code? What did you think? Use the Comments link to share your thoughts. I’d be interested in reading what other people who read the book and saw the movie have to say.

Baumgart’s

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A Chinese restaurant with a difference.

When we lived in Harrington Park, NJ, we discovered Baumgart’s, a Chinese restaurant in nearby Englewood. We ate there quite often during the 11 years we lived in New Jersey.

Baumgart’s isn’t your typical Chinese restaurant. First of all, it occupies the space once occupied by a good, old fashioned luncheonette — the kind with a counter and soda fountain. I’m not sure, but I think the old luncheonette had the same name. When we took my grandmother there for dinner one night, she told us that she used to have lunch there years ago while waiting for a bus to or from New York City, where she worked.

I’m not sure if it’s still true, but when we lived in New Jersey ten years ago, you could still get luncheonette food at the restaurant during the day — breakfast and lunch, that is. I’m talking about things like egg salad sandwiches and pastrami sandwiches and ice cream sodas. Mind you, this is a Chinese restaurant with Chinese — or at least Asian — people working at the counter, in the kitchen, and at the tables.

At dinner time, the menu is primarily Chinese food — but not the typical chow mein and fried rice you’d find in a Chinese restaurant. Instead, there are other dishes prepared in the Chinese way — in a wok with Chinese sauces and seasonings. On Friday night, we had noodles with sesame sauce (a Chinese restaurant standard) and a mixture of Chinese eggplant, chicken breast, squid, and shrimp in a tasty sauce. My favorite item from the old menu — it wasn’t on the current menu — was eggplant stuffed with shrimp. They also used to serve broccolli stems sliced into small chunks and marinated in some kind of garlic concoction. It was so different and tasty that most of the folks we took to eat there never even realized they were eating the least desirable part of broccoli.

Some years back, Baumgarts broke through the wall of the space next door and expanded the dining room there. They chose an art deco decor that included old movie posters and pastel colors. Not my idea of good decor for the 1990s and certainly not for the 2000s. But the booths are big and comfortable and the place is bright, even late at night.

We went for dinner at nearly 9 PM, hoping to stay on Arizona time (6 PM) for the entire length of our stay. The restaurant was just starting to empty out after what had probably been a busy dinner hour. Restaurants in the metro area don’t close at 8:30 or 9:00 — that’s when the night is just beginning for many people. The streets don’t roll up, either — outside was a continuous stream of people strolling past, the smell of Greek food from the restaurant across the street, and the sound of life.

After our meal, we shared a baked apple with homemade vanilla ice cream and real whipped cream. On some nights, they also offer fresh baked apple dumplings — if you go there when that’s available, I highly recommend it.

I miss restaurants like Baumgart’s — restaurants that offer more than just the usual fare. It was nice to go back.

But I do miss that shrimp-stuffed eggplant dish.